[mythtv-users] Watching TV without recording?

[Joseph A. Caputo]

On Saturday 21 February 2004 14:29, Michael McConnell wrote:
> 
> - I really love the EGP and Onscreen display features (and mythtv overall),
> but my P3-500 (I can't afford a PVR 250) can't keep up, is there a way to
> watch live TV directly from the capture card? Just the way XAWTV does?

Yes.  Well, sort of.  You can replace the command normally fun by the "Watch 
TV" button with "EXECTV xawtv", and simply use xawtv (or your preferred v4l 
program) to do you LiveTV viewing.  Of course, you lose the ability to 
timeshift, and you also risk missing a scheduled recording.  This is because 
the EXECTV directive informs the Myth scheduler that the tuner is busy, and 
Myth has no way to interrupt it, as it does with its built-in LiveTV by 
popping up an OSD dialog.  However, if you really don't care about 
timeshifting live TV and you know you don't have a scheduled recording coming 
up, then this could be for you.  It's also a viable way to use an analog 
capture card in a really under-powered frontend.  If you have an analog tuner 
card that you don't have any use for in your backend(s), you could pop it 
into a frontend and use it like I've described above for watching LiveTV.  
This has the advantage of leaving the rest of your "real" Myth-configured 
tuners available for scheduled recordings.  Of course, this is predicated on 
the supposition that you can *ever* have a "spare/unused" tuner :-)


-JAC