[theophile]

I'm thinking that this line will need to be used until XBMC development catches up with mplayer development:
video_player = mplayer -autosync 30 -fixed-vo -softvol -cache 8192 -really-quiet %s
and that things like this should be autoinstalled when this script is first ran.

I agree, but I think that line should be hardcoded into the script, rather than trying to use the user's video_player line and appending flags to it. This is especially true if the user is using VLC or even the Applian FLV player via Wine (which the mlbviewer developer has done at times).

I still don't think that the flash video playback in XBMC is complete. There's that message in the log about AVC consuming the incorrect number of bytes, for instance. I wonder if mplayer can seek better with the saved .flv files better than XBMC, for instance.

XBMC actually seeks better than mplayer does. It keeps the audio and video in sync better too. The AVC consumption errors are not problems with XBMC. Rather, that's in the ffmpeg decoder. You are right, though, that the ffmpeg support for this particular form of encapsulation is far from complete.

As far as killing the mplayer process, this might be helpful:

http://objectmix.com/python/381913-kill-...cific.html

I am not a python coder, but I think a PID-specific approach would work and would be compatible with your plans for doing multiple streams simultaneously.