[mythtv] Making MythTV more OSX Friendly

[Patrick Tescher]

Hi, my name is Patrick and I have been using MythTV for the last
couple of days on my Mac. Basically I love MythTV and I am amazed at
how well the frontend works on the Mac already. I have gotten
MythVideo to work as well as some other plugins and it works really
well on my new Mac Mini. I would love to help out getting MythTV to
work better on the Mac and I think with the new Mac Mini there would
be a lot of people who would love to use their Mac as a media box.

Now to get down to the problems:

1. There is no backend. This basically means that using the installer
MythTV is pretty much useless unless you have a Linux backend (the
installer does not install any plugins). Now I am aware that the
current backend just doesnt work on the mac and probably never will. I
would love to write a new Mac backend that used some of the USB tuners
out there from <a href="http://www.elgato.com/">Elgato</a> but it
would take a lot of work and probably wont happen anytime soon. I
propose that the Mac version simply disables anything related to
recording TV from a tuner or watching live TV.

2. Some plugins such as MythDVD are written to only support linux /dev
devices and not MacOS. This should be pretty easy to fix and I will
look into it. Other plugins such as MythMusic might need a little work
to compile properly and also should look into the user's ~/Music
folder (or ~/Pictures for MythGallery) and would thus work out of the
box without any user interraction.

3. Currelty there is one binary package and it does not include any
plugins. It would be nice to make a better installer, with optional
plugins, QT framework installed somewhere where other QT apps can
access it and some documentation.


I am currently in the process of trying to fix all these problems for
my own machine. I am planning on contributing any improvements back to
MythTV and if there is someone else who is working on Mac specific
issues I would love to work with them.

~Patrick