Created as a snipper to share with Avdi.

rake_snippet.rb

# once upon a time these rake tasks were in use in my house.  I had a program that would scrape my kids
# TV shows off of my tivo as they were recorded and dump them in a directory.  Of course, they had tivo's
# encryption on them.  the 'decode' task transcoded them to mp4 and moved them to a different directory,
# and the 'publish' task would copy them to a generation one Apple TV (the one with the 40 gig hard drive).
# My kids then had a never-ending source of Dora and Dinosaur Train, and I had vital space on my Tivo for
# things like "The Walking Dead".  With a parental code in my Tivo, my kids' shows were sandboxed in a
# safe place.
#
# I presented this code as an example of automation in a conference talk done several times, and this code
# was actually taken off of a slide used for that talk. As such, the original code was a little longer
# (variable names for directories, etc), and contained a password for the scp command.
#
# These were scheduled to run in the early morning via cron.

namespace :tivo do 

  task :decode do
    Dir.foreach('~/video/tivoshows/') do |file|
      outname = file.gsub("mpeg", "mp4")
      `tivodecode -n -o #{FIle.join("~/videos/tvshows", outname)}, file`
    end
  end

  task :publish_to_appletv do
    Net::SSH.start('myappletv.local', 'dbock', 'yeahright') do |ssh|
      ssh.sftp.connect do |sftp|
        Dir.foreach('~/videos/tvshows/') { |file| sftp.put_file(File.join("~/videos/tvshows",file), file) }
      end
    end
  end
end