[EmuMannen]

Well, I'm going to college this year, and torrents are blocked at WSU in washington.

Which means i'll have to get my TV shows the old fashioned way, using a PVR. Luckily, i have a TV tuner card on the way. Now, i'd like to record my shows using MythTV, but since the MythTV interface sucks compared to XBMC, i was wondering:

How good is the myth frontend in XBMC? Will I be able to forgo the frontend for MythTV altogether, or will I need to schedule recordings and whatnot from the MythTV frontend? I'm doing all this from an installation of Mythbuntu.

I haven't been able to make the “myth://” source work 100% reliable yet but I use the following solution as a work around until stable PVR functionality in included in XBMC:

This solution require a working MythTV-back-end (referred to as the back-end). EPG and sceduling of recordings has to be done via Myth-web. The machine running XBMC is referred to as the front-end”.

On the back-end:

Create a directory to hold listings of your recordings (links with proper names):
E.g: ”/var/lib/mythtv/listings”

Export the directory holding listings and recordings trough NFS or make a SMB share using Samba:
E.g: “/var/lib/mythtv”

Run mythrename.pl to create links to your recordings (hint: you can make several subdirectories with different list, sortable on date, title, recording group etc., assigning different series to different recording groups make it easy to make separate lists for series, categories or users):
E.g: ”mythrename.pl --link /var/lib/mythtv/listings”

On the front-end:

Create a directory that will hold the listings and recordings (I run Linux so it's natural to mount them trough NFS in fstab, I guess it could be done using a SMB-share but I don't know for sure if it would work with Linux symlinks, created by mythrename.pl, and SMB-sources in XBMC, NFS makes it possible to transparently make them part of the front-ends local file system):
E.g: ”mount mythhostname:/var/lib/mythtv /var/lib/mythtv”

Create a source in XBMC that points to the local directory holding the list of recordings:
E.g: ”/var/lib/mythtv/listings”

You can now conveniently browse and playback your back-ends recordings from your front-end. This is a rock solid solution only involving the file system and the NFS protocol, making it possible to fast forward etc. (my replacement for commercial skipping).

This works great for OTA viewing but what about viewing in real time? There is no convenient way to zap around with this solution but you can watch a program in real time (or near real time). This is how it is done:

Browse the EPG trough Myth-web and start a recording of the program you want to watch.

Run mythrename.pl as soon as the recording has started to create a link to the file the program is recorded to.

Browse the list of links with recordings and start playback of the program (works great during recording of a program, you can even rewind, fast forward etc.).

This solution soles most of my needs but how do we keep the list of links updated? We don't want to be forced to manually run mythrename.pl every time the back-end starts a recording or removes a file (e.g. when recordings are purged due to auto deletion etc.). I have seen solutions based on cron but that is not a particularly elegant solution if we have to poll for changes all the time. My solution is to use incron instead. Set it to watch the directory holding the recordings (e.g. /var/lib/mythtv/recordings) and make it run mythrename.pl on the events IN_CREATE and IN_DELETE.

Some useful links for the ones going down this path:
NFS
mythrename.pl
incron