[mythtv] Introduction LONG (was Re: Interesting Comparison)

[Mike]

Hi Aaron:

My name is Mike and I am a fellow lurker here. I am a Mythtv user, and
in my career, an occaisional programmer. I joined the -dev list here
to try to learn more about how the plugin system works, the
architecture, and to 'scratch my itches.' So far, I still have no clue
how the plugin system works, so if anybody knows of documentation on
how they interface, please point me to the correct faq! Thanks.

I had had an idea similar to yours in which at one point I wanted to
set up a mythtv backend to decode to cable to feed channels to dumb
tvs as opposed to mythtv front ends. I gave up on it because I am not
much of a channel flipper myself and I went and put together a nice
front end system.

On 3/3/06, Aaron Howard <archanoid at gmail.com> wrote:
> What I'm unsure of is: in order to seek forward in the remaining open
> files, how much decoding has to take place?  Is it relatively CPU
> intensive to seek one second forward in 11 videos at nearly the same
> time?  Is it memory intensive to hold that many videos open?  Would it
> work if the maximum number of "channels" or playlists was three or four?

This _might_ not be all that bad, if you stop and think of it a little
different maybe. 1st problem which I think is already addressed
somewhere in the plugins:
     You want a backend to stream a playlist, (and launch multiple
instances of itself with different streams)
     You want a front end to play a video stream off the network, and
a convenient framework to move from one frame to another. The only
decoding in this scenario would be the front end decoding the one
streaming it is currently watching.

Disclaimer, I am a knoppmyth user and have not tried compiling _any_
myth components and have not _yet_ tried adding additional plugins to
my install.

With that out of the way, the unofficial plugins page:
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/MythUnofficialPlugins
Lists two plugins that provide some of this functionality, maybe just
not exactly what you want yet, but maybe a start.

On the backend: MythStreamTV - Live transcoding and streaming of
MythTV recordings.
On the frontend: MythStream -- Playing of Audio and Video Streams in MythTV

> And lastly, would it make sense to try to code this type of
> functionality as a Myth plugin?  Or am I barking up the wrong tree?
>
> Like I said, I have an itch and I want to scratch it but I'm way over my
> head in the a/v coding area (and for all intents and purposes a newb at
> C++).  Any thoughts, advice, feedback, and/or guffaws are welcome.

Since those two plugins exist, I would say it sounds like you are
barking up the correct tree. Good luck with it!

--Mike