[mythtv-users] xbox frontend
Mr. Myth
mythtv at blandford.net
Thu Jul 24 17:43:52 EDT 2003
Derek Watson wrote:
> The ideal scenario as I see it would be to take the myth frontend and
> actually build it as an xbox application. I haven't looked into the
> complexity of it as yet, but it may be possible to leverage off the
> existing (and excellent) xboxmediaplayer since it already uses
> mplayer, provides a bunch of codecs and has support for streaming
> protocols etc. So the only major thing would surely be building a myth
> UI layer that knows how to talk to a standard linux myth backend.
From that angle, it would probably just be easier to take the xbmp
source code and add a myth compatibility layer to talk to the backup to
get the info. xbmp can already play the files generated by mythtv.
While I agree that this would be a nice clean native solution, it would
also be the most work and a a lot of new code base. I dont want to take
the work everyone has done and redesign it to work on another platform.
My expertise is linux OS management - not in programming additions for
the front end.
> The benefit in this approach is that boot time is negligible (whereas
> ed's debian takes about 45 secs to boot) and there are no problems
> with corrupt disk partitions (definitely an issue if you turn the xbox
> off without shutting down).
Yes, but keep in mind how much extra stuff it is doing to boot a
complete distro. There are daemons, processes, etc that get started to
get a multi-user environment. I think if we strip out everything that
isnt needed, it could be done in around 15 seconds. That isnt much
different than it takes to start xbmp. Since nothing would change in
the xbox-mythfrontend, the disk image could be mounted read only. Then
you wouldnt have to worry about the corrupt disk or even checking the disk.
To me this gets the same net result without any coding, just a lot of
cleanup. There also wouldnt be a need to keep in sync with the myth
team as far as code/bug/api changes. You could just download a new
version and add it to the tiny linux distro and call it good.
>
> Installation would simply be an ftp upload of the XBE + config +
> skins, and the system becomes more of an "instant on" consumer device
> like a VCR or DVD player.
Same with my method as well. That is my end goal.
Mikey
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