PVR Progress
I’ve decided that MythTV is still too bitty for the average user to set up and keep running. This is a shame, since it is obvious that a lot of time and effort has gone into building it, designing the plugin architecture etc.. I’m going to persevere with MythTV for the live home system for now, but I’ve decided to build an alternative - “The Borg Box”.
Mplayer and Xine are easy to use and have good LIRC support (remote controls are desirable in the McKibbin household), so this will start as a manager and wrapper for those rather than trying to implement all of their functionality. Weather I use occasionally, but doesn’t warrant the effort I would spend on it for a first pass, so I’ve decided to implement something similar to MythVideo first. As most code I write is cross platform, and development takes place equally on my Mac notebook and my office Debian machine, it was pot luck to see where I was going to start on this.
Mac notebook won, since I was waiting for a MythTV listings update, and wanted to be near the backend. Since I use MPlayer on the Mac, I decided to see how difficult it would be to pick up a file from the MythVideo database and play it.
MythTV stores all of its configuration data in a MySQL database called mythconverg. I picked up the username/password combination from ~/.mythtv/mysql.txt; logged in and started to examine the data. The MythTV box has been running for some time now and I’ve managed to accumulate a number of AVI files. Native Myth storage is in an MPG ring buffer, and conversion to XVID AVI’s is pretty well documented elsewhere, but if there are enough comments, I’ll produce more detail on how to do this.
All of the MythVideo converted files are referenced in the videometadata table, and you can pick up the path of the video episode from “filename”. All NFS mounted paths are the same across all of my computers, so I could run the file directly using the “open” command on the Mac. All that was really required was to set up access permissions to allow any computer on my network to access the database. A quick re-compile on a Debian machine, with the “xine -pqhf -n” instruction replacing “open” and it was running in Debian under X.
So I now have a program that will pick a random file from the MythTV database and play it on either Max or Debbie. Good enough for one night. I’m looking at making the final “Borg Box” commercial, once I have full integration.
Not that I would ship it on a Pentium II, but The Eden + Hauppauge combination works well, and Debian machines built on this platform may become my chosen distribution.