[dexx]

Has/will XBMC under Linux support DVB-T tv cards for watching free to air TV?

[Jezz_X]

Has = no
will = who knows

right now the priority is get it to work like it does on the xbox after that features may or may not be added

[narcan]

On a slighly related topic..

I've got a good setup going at the moment by using xbmc + mythtv

xbmc to drive everything apart from TV. Changed the 'Programs' link on the main menu to point to 'mythtv' , which is a standalone version of the tv component from the mythtv frontend. It happily runs over the top of XBMC, so once done watching TV just press esc (or back on the remote) it quits and it's back into XBMC.

Works great.

[Gamester17]

http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/wiki/inde...rt_project

Note to XBMC end-users! Please understand that this Linux port project is not yet mature enough for a regular end-user to play with. We can not yet give you an ETA as to when it will be useful for end-users. Respect that we can not accept any bug-reports or feature/function-requests for this Linux port yet, nor do we offer support to end-users. If you are an end-user and have any general questions or need to get something off your chest about this then please direct that towards the existing XBMC Linux port end-user discussion topic-thread in our community-forum. If, however, you are a developer or have Linux expertise, we encourage you to keep reading to find out how you can help.

What is XBMC and why port it to Linux?

For the developers who does not know this; XBMC (short for XBox Media Center, not to be confused with Microsoft's Windows Media Center Extender for the Xbox) is an award-winning free and open source media player, originally designed to run on the Xbox game-console. The GPL/LGPL licensed source code basically consist of a GUI framework that has been written from scratch by Team-XBMC, this GUI acts as a front-end control interface for several audio/video players designed for specific purposes (and those are loaded when needed as DLLs), the GUI is also the user interface to all of XBMC multimedia handling functions such as databases and sorting, etc.. The XBMC Project, (who's members maintain XBMC source code), is a non-profit open source hobby project that is developed by volunteers in their spare-time without any monetary gain. The team of developers working on XBMC have always encouraged anyone to submit your own source code patches for new features or functions, improve on existing ones, or fix bugs.

The difference this time is that we are not asking for new features/functions, what we are asking is for the existing code to be ported so it will compile and run under a Linux operating-system (with the same features/functions that are already available on the Xbox version of XBMC). The main reasons for porting XBMC to Linux are non-technical, (so it is not that the Xbox hardware is too slow or to old for the XBMC GUI or its existing features/functions), the real reasons are that we want XBMC to get a larger end-user and developer-base, because the more people who use XBMC and help maintain the code (and skins) the longer the project will grow and stay alive. The main reason from an end-user point of view is that the Xbox can not playback native high-definition video (at 720p and 1080i/1080p), especially not if the video is encoded with a H.264 or VC-1 codec. Nevertheless, note that we will still keep the old Xbox as the reference platform for standard-definition resolution video for some time (possibly a few more years), which means that the same GUI (and skins) that runs smooth under Linux on a relatively new computer must also run just as smooth on the old Xbox hardware (or a old computer that closely matches the Xbox hardware, at 733Mhz Intel Pentium III CPU and only 64MB shared memory with supported 3D accelerator).

Like Jezz_X said, new 'Linux specific' features/functions are not a priority

[Rand Al Thor]

@narcan Sounds cool, how did you accomplish that? Did you just edit the skin?

[FlappySocks]

Shouldn't be hard to support DVB in the future. Linux comes with very good DVB support. I have two DVB-S and one DVB-T cards in my linux box.

[narcan]

@narcan Sounds cool, how did you accomplish that? Did you just edit the skin?

Yeah I just created a python simple script to launch 'mythtv' which is called from the skin.

'mythtv' should be installed by default with mythtv.

Script (put in 'XBMC/scripts'):

Code:

#!/usr/bin/python
import os
cmd = 'mythtv'
os.system(cmd)

Then just modified the skin to launch the script:

I changed the 'Program' link under Home.xml (for Project Mayhem III):

Code:

<control type="button" id="2">
                                        <description>My TV normal push button</description>
                                        <posx>53</posx>
                                        <posy>28</posy>
                                        <width>12</width>
                                        <height>14</height>
                                        <hitrect x="45" y="15" w="220" h="40" />
                                        <label>0</label>
                                        <font>special13</font>
[b]                                        <onclick>XBMC.RunScript(q:\scripts\mythtv.py)</onclick>[/b]
                                        <onleft>98</onleft>
                                        <onright>96</onright>
                                        <onup>9</onup>
                                        <ondown>4</ondown>
                                        <texturefocus>home-focus.gif</texturefocus>
                                        <texturenofocus>-</texturenofocus>
                                        <textoffsetx>30</textoffsetx>
                                </control>

Also changed the string from 'Program' to 'TV' in XBMC/language/English/strings.xml (string id 0)

[Rand Al Thor]

Groovy, that is the same way I'm launching firefox atm. Cheers for the reply.

[blazko]

Hello!

Thanks for your tip! I am using VDR with Softdevice (ShmClient). When I launch the ShmClient-Window per Python script, the VDR window appears but it will not play as XBMC still occupies the audio device.
Is there a possibility to release the audio device using some XBMC.somewhat call bevore pointing to the Python script?
If so, will it resume when I close the VDR window? I suppose any call in the Home.xml is not blocking (i.e. waiting until the application called will exit)?

Thank you,
Timo

[althekiller]

Your best bet for now is to call an external python script (which will run in the shell python interpreter not XBMC's) and from that kill XBMC then start your other app and finally restart xbmc when you close the other app.

[mkortstiege]

althekiller, is it possible to modify the System.Exec with a bool value for having the complete focus (inputs/lirc included) ? This would make more sense than starting and stopping xbmc everytime a third party app is launched.

regards
vdrfan

[Gamester17]

althekiller, is it possible to modify the System.Exec with a bool value for having the complete focus (inputs/lirc included) ? This would make more sense than starting and stopping xbmc everytime a third party app is launched.

regards
vdrfan

Wrong topic thread.

[mkortstiege]

Your best bet for now is to call an external python script (which will run in the shell python interpreter not XBMC's) and from that kill XBMC then start your other app and finally restart xbmc when you close the other app.

I dont think so. Its a related to the previous post @ Gamester17

[blazko]

Hello althekiller,

thanks for the hint! Is there a chance to invoke that external script from within XBMC? What I tried is to invoke a python via XBMC.RunScript() which in turn invokes a shell script.
Funily, XBMC seems to shut down (using killall -w -v xbmc.bin) and the following app starts (for testing purposes I use rhythmbox instead of VDR).
Rhythmbox then complains about the audio device still in use. I wonder why because how can the script kill XBMC and then start Rhythmbox if it is executed as child process of XBMC? I would have expected that the shell script stops executing upon the killall xbmc.bin - not executing the rest.
Has anyone ideas on how to get this working? Tried to reinit the device using alsa command but no success. Playing around with sleep between killing and invoking did not help.

Thank you!