[mythtv-users] video scheduling for local/public access cable channel

[Bruce Markey]

Ian Connor wrote:
> I work with a nonprofit public access TV station and we are looking
> for video scheduling system to broadcast our local channel.

MythTV schedules recordings. It does not schedule playback.

> We will be producing a content ourselves (probably via a macintosh as
> well as from video tape through traditional video editing means). We
> will also be pulling information that is free to rebroadcast from
> sattelite feeds (there is a lot of content that you can rebroadcast
> through cable TV as a non-profit).

MythTV could be useful here for scheduling the digital recording
of sattelite feeds if you have listing for these feeds from
DataDirect or even XMLTV. Myth would be able to control multilpe
tuners on one or many machines, prioritize conflicts, avoid duplicates,
etc. You would then need something else to schedule playback of
the recordings.

> So, I would imagine that we would rip the video all to hard disk,
> download the video files produced on the macintosh and then schedule
> it to be played back. We only have one channel to fill so the system
> does not need to be too fancy. I noticed that MythTV can control a
> number of TVs - so could we have the cable channel set up as one of
> these?

Again, record and playback are vague here. Myth "can control a number
of TV" tuner cards for recording. A number of users each at a computer
(hooked up to TV or monitor) running mythfronted can control mythtv.
The frontend is for user interaction and is not designed for automated
broadcast playback.

> When we are not playing content, we have a public services board that
> displays a little slide show of what is going on in the town. I can
> see MythTV allows you to show photo slides through your TV - this idea
> would work well if we could automate when the slide would show and
> when and what videos would show.
> 
> The system now is not software based at all. We have a controlling box
> that does nothing more than turn on video tapes and switch to show
> that tape. We program the video switching device when to rewind, when
> to play and when to stop - so to my mind doing this all on a computer
> should not be that much different and I hope it would not cost too
> much while giving us more flexibility. I hope that we would be able to
> control it and automate it from there.
> 
> However, the question is where to start and if MythTV can do some of
> the job with little or no coding changes.

There is an executable called "mythtv" that takes a filename as an
argument and simply plays the file. You could potentially write
scripts that run the specific files at a prescribed time.

--  bjm