2004-10-12, 18:34
madtw: great job! i've been hoping for some mythtv support from xbmc for a while now.
i've been thinking more about the possibility of watching live tv from xbmc. i too have an ivtv-supported card, and could also symlink /dev/video, but as you mentioned earlier, there are some serious drawbacks to doing so. i started looking at how mythfrontend does it, and i believe they use a ring buffer to play the video from. this can be observed by watching for a .nuv file to be created when you start watching live tv from mythfronted.
i then started looking for ring buffer support in mplayer, and came across this page. it describes ring buffers, and provides patches for mplayer which enable such support.
the only thing i'm unsure about is which part of myth creates the ring buffer- the front end or the back end. if the back end creates the ring buffer, it'd be simple to implement a live tv function. if the front end handles the creation of the ring buffer, then i think we'll have to wait for some more features from xbmc.
lastly, i was stepping though some of the xbmc souce, and looking for ways to add python hooks for the osd, so channel numbers could be displayed (this looks promising). as far as changing channels goes, however, i'm unsure about one thing: if a video is playing, and the user presses a key on the remote, does the script's button callback method get called? if not, then channel changing would be a little more difficult.
i've been thinking more about the possibility of watching live tv from xbmc. i too have an ivtv-supported card, and could also symlink /dev/video, but as you mentioned earlier, there are some serious drawbacks to doing so. i started looking at how mythfrontend does it, and i believe they use a ring buffer to play the video from. this can be observed by watching for a .nuv file to be created when you start watching live tv from mythfronted.
i then started looking for ring buffer support in mplayer, and came across this page. it describes ring buffers, and provides patches for mplayer which enable such support.
the only thing i'm unsure about is which part of myth creates the ring buffer- the front end or the back end. if the back end creates the ring buffer, it'd be simple to implement a live tv function. if the front end handles the creation of the ring buffer, then i think we'll have to wait for some more features from xbmc.
lastly, i was stepping though some of the xbmc souce, and looking for ways to add python hooks for the osd, so channel numbers could be displayed (this looks promising). as far as changing channels goes, however, i'm unsure about one thing: if a video is playing, and the user presses a key on the remote, does the script's button callback method get called? if not, then channel changing would be a little more difficult.