[RELEASE] MythBox for XBMC - a MythTV Front-end Python Script for XBMC

theophile Wrote:there is evidently a Windows port of MythTV, but judging by the wiki page on how to compile and build it, you'd be much better off with a Ubuntu install and hammering out your hardware problems.

You must have missed this section:

Win32 Build Script Wrote:The "HOWTO" section below is LONG, painful, and easy to get wrong (and possibly a bit out of date! ). However, follow this section, and you can ignore it! :-)

To Get activestate perl AND the build script, download and run this:
http://svn.mythtv.org/svn/trunk/packagin...taller.bat

So you download and run MythInstaller.bat. Sounds pretty easy to me.

Quote:I may be mistaken, but I'm fairly sure only the frontend has been ported so far.. so unfortunatley you still need to have tuners that work under linux to get your backend working.

This is only partially correct. The backend has been ported, but they don't have tuner support working yet, which doesn't make it very useful, now does it?

So, basically, there is a MythTV backend for Windows, but it doesn't support any tuners yet, so you'll have to wait a bit if you want to do it that way.

waldo22 Wrote:You must have missed this section:



So you download and run MythInstaller.bat. Sounds pretty easy to me.



This is only partially correct. The backend has been ported, but they don't have tuner support working yet, which doesn't make it very useful, now does it?

So, basically, there is a MythTV backend for Windows, but it doesn't support any tuners yet, so you'll have to wait a bit if you want to do it that way.

Don't forget: you can install linux inside a VM, and then run mythbackend from there. This is my plan to run XBMC/mythtv under windows.

Gossamer threads would have more info on this:
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/

pseudonym Wrote:Don't forget: you can install linux inside a VM, and then run mythbackend from there. This is my plan to run XBMC/mythtv under windows.[/url]

Just note the only video hardware you might be able to use is anything USB (and it has to be well supported) or any networking based device.
There is no hardware PCI support in VM, so it might make things harder.

I have found that the MythTV internal player can be launched in "standalone" mode with the command 'mythtv'. If executed by itself, it fires up Live TV but it can be followed by a filename for a recording in which case it starts playing it. All MythTV functions are retained including edits and cutlists.

Since the XBMC player cannot give me usable playback of HD content, I would LOVE it if MythBox could be configured to play MythTV content (recordings and live TV) using the MythTV player rather than the XBMC player.

Could this be done? Thanks!

theophile Wrote:I have found that the MythTV internal player can be launched in "standalone" mode with the command 'mythtv'. If executed by itself, it fires up Live TV but it can be followed by a filename for a recording in which case it starts playing it. All MythTV functions are retained including edits and cutlists.

Since the XBMC player cannot give me usable playback of HD content, I would LOVE it if MythBox could be configured to play MythTV content (recordings and live TV) using the MythTV player rather than the XBMC player.

Could this be done? Thanks!

Might be worth doing considering that XBMC trunk just got external player support. However, I don't think they extended this feature to the scripting interface (the python accessible xbmc.Player(..)) class though. I was thinking any player really with VDPAU and lirc support or just the plain old mythtv executable (never tried this myself). Please add a feature request to MythBox (on the googlecode site) and maybe it'll show up soon :-)

-analogue

Done. I apologize if I did it in the wrong place. :-)

One question... I obviously know nothing about programming and even less about how scripts interact with XBMC. But I assume that somewhere in the script code, there's a line or two that tells XBMC it should start playing the given file. Why isn't it as easy as having the script execute some other command instead?

I'm not criticizing, just curious!

theophile Wrote:Done. I apologize if I did it in the wrong place. :-)

One question... I obviously know nothing about programming and even less about how scripts interact with XBMC. But I assume that somewhere in the script code, there's a line or two that tells XBMC it should start playing the given file. Why isn't it as easy as having the script execute some other command instead?

I'm not criticizing, just curious!

Well, theres all sorts of integration issues that need to be considered which might or might not be valid:

- xbmc would most likely have to relinquish control of lirc so the mythtv player can assume control
- window focus issues - do xbmc and mythtv play nice when spawned as a child process
- screen resolution change issues
- running in fullscreen or windowed mode issues
- contention over activity timeout issues (dimming/going to sleep/screensaver, etc)
- correct configuration of mythtv using its frontend to get it to 'behave' when launched from xbmc

I'm sure are plenty more that I haven't even thought of...

Hey All,

I am trying to get the script working I am on SVN 17369 as of this morning. I dwnlded the latest mythbox svn untarred it to .xbmc/scripts

rebooted and click on Mythbox it just says running for a split second and thats it. If I run debug, it pops up the python script and says something about loading module error and then cannot input os, no module from os.

I am on 8.10 base install with and Mythtv runs ok from the myth:// protocol I can watch live etc..

Sorry I have no log to post as I take that mythbox cannot get by the opening script to start thus it is not creating a log by the looks of it.

the actual error

traceback (last call)
in line 1
no module threading

then down the debug in line of default.py script line 24

traceback (last call)
import os
no module os


Thanks,

Dave

I finally got mythtv working, and the only reason i was trying to do so is to be able to watch tv from my xbmc machine outside. I setup mythtv on my media storage server (which is not my xbmc machine). both are running on ubuntu 8.10.

to make things clearer:
- storage server (192.168.1.5) has mythtv (with nexus-s card) running on it
- xbmc (192.168.1.4) has mythbox on it (with no mythtv installtions locally)

mythbox can get all the info (channel list, whats going on with the tuners, etc..) but can not play live tv (note that im very new to mythtv and relativly new to both xbmc and linux).

i read here one post where the recording dir from mythtv (which remote) is mounted on the xbmc machine to be used / accessed to play... ?!

megacrypto Wrote:i read here one post where the recording dir from mythtv (which remote) is mounted on the xbmc machine to be used / accessed to play... ?!

I'm not 100% I understand what you're saying, but anyway, yes you have to mount the recordings locally for mythbox to find them. So you have to mount the recordings on 192.168.1.5 to your local box 192.168.1.4 with for example sshfs, samba, nfs, and then point mythbox to the dir.