meth

The name “meth” is short for “mediathek”, a german online media portal. Meth is a command line tool that allows to query, play and download media from various state channels. It uses the files build by ZDF Mediathek. It cannot work without it.

Install

Clone the repo and build it using sbt:

sbt assembly

Then link the resulting executable target/scala-2.12/meth-* somewhere in your $PATH. For example:

ln -snf target/scala-2.12/meth-* ~/bin/meth

Usage

There are 3 main commands: query, play and download. The query command accepts a search string and prints the results. Play and download use external tools mpv and curl, respectively.

Query

The search syntax is quite simple. There are few basic forms:

1. key:value
2. value
3. dow:[sun|mon|tue|wed|thu|fri|sat]
4. >X or <X

The first matches when value is contained in the field named key. Available keys are

• station
• subject
• title
• description
• date
• time
• new

The second variant matches when value is contained in either subject or title. Then it is possible to find shows aired on a specific weekday. Form 4 can be used to match shows with a duration greater or smaller X minutes.

These forms can be combined with or, and and not:

• and: (& ...)
• or: (| ...)
• not: -...

The - in front of any term negates it. If many forms are separated by space they are combined via and.

Example: meth refugee '>10' dow:fri

Download

Instead of printing the results of a query, you can download these shows using the download command. By default this calls out to the curl program. This can be configured in the config file. See the reference.conf file in src/main/resources.

The command allows to specify a filename using a pattern. The pattern is simply a string with placeholders for data that is obtained from a show:

• station
• title
• subject
• year
• month
• day
• hour
• min
• date
• time

A placeholder is specified by putting it inside a %[]. Example: %[subject]-%[title]. Note that any placeholder can evaluate to the empty string if there is no value (i.e. if it is mispelled).

Quite often it is necessary to append or prepend text only if a placeholder evaluates to non-empty. This can be achieved by this syntax: %[subject|prepend-%[subject]-append]. This means “check if there is a subject value and if so evaluate the pattern after |”.

The default pattern is: %[subject|%[subject]-%]%[title]-%[date].

1. thetvdb.com

   Note: this is a very experimental feature.

   It is possible to extend the set of placeholder variables by searching the site http://thetvdb.com. This allows to use placeholders in the output file pattern with the information from thetvdb.com. This can be useful to get e.g. the episode number to generate file names that can be recognized by certain players like kodi.

   For this to work, you must register at thetvdb.com and add the apikey to the config file. Also the series id of the series to search must be supplied to the download command. At last there is only one way to search: using the date of a show as the firstAired date. But this must be selected explicitely using the --tvdb-firstaired option.

   All placeholders are prefixed by tvdb..

   Example: s%[year]e%[tvdb.airedEpisodeNumber]_%[tvdb.episodeName]

Configure

You can configure it via a file ~/.config/meth/meth.conf. Every setting there can be overriden by setting a system property. Use the environment variable METH_JAVA_OPTS for this.

Example: METH_JAVA_OPTS=-Dmeth.directory=/tmp/meth meth

The Config library is used. Please see its documentation fo find out more. Please see the default config at src/main/resources for all options.

Example