[mythtv] The path forward

[Joseph A. Caputo]

First, let me say that I am constantly impressed & amazed by the speed
and quality of the ongoing Myth development.  At this point, the only
thing stopping me from putting my MythBox permanently in my living room
is the lack of a good IR receiver and a remote with enough buttons (both
of which I hope to soon rectify).  Anyway, now that the 0.8 release is
approaching, it might be a good time to consider overall direction as we
progress toward Myth 1.0. 

In playing around with MythVideo, I noticed a few things.  First, that
it seems to have initially been conceived as a more generic media file
explorer module, with the capability to define handlers for different
file types.  There seems to have been some attempt at managing metadata,
which was not fully implemented.  However, as it stands, there is no
reason you couldn't point it to your recordings directory and define the
handler for .nuv files to be the patched MPlayer.  This of course,
duplicates the functionality of the "Watch Recordings" part of
mythfrontend.  After all, everything we're dealing with is, at a basic
level, a media file.  So why have different modules/interfaces just
because the media type is different?  All of the files dealt with by
Myth share the following attributes:  a data file, some (optional)
metadata, and a handler for opening/viewing the file.  The handler could
be an external application or an internal handler (like Myth's internal
Nuppel player). 

So, why not make the Myth architecture more plugin-centric?  I mean, if
we could define a standard interface to a MythBrowser module (taking the
existing "Watch Recordings" as a basis), then a plugin module could
simply feed it a list of media/metadata and register a handler (whether
internal or external).  Maybe even give it a way to hook into the live
preview window. If the browsing module was run-time configurable, you
could decide (via an XML or text settings file, like the current menu
scheme) to have ALL of your media available in a single browse list,
instead of having separate ones for TV and Video/Movies.  Or you could
separate things out as you saw fit.  Of course, the current MythVideo
module would allow this, but it's very basic (and as some have
complained, not "set-top box-like" enough), so rather than extend it,
why not open up the internal browsing interface?

Of course, the option will always be present to launch an external
application instead of a plugin, and a plugin (such as MythWeather) need
not do anything more than have its main user interface invoked by Myth. 

Anyway, I thought I'd start a thread to see what people think.  Like I
said before, I think Myth is amazing as it is, and I certainly don't
mean to insult anyone's efforts.

So, any thoughts?

-Joe C.