[mythtv-users] Internal Video player (was: MythVideo Folder Support)

[J. Donavan Stanley]

Albert Santoni wrote:
> You're my hero. Officially.
> MythTV just keeps getting better all the time. Having MythVideo and 
> MythDVD's OSDs match MythTV's would add a tremendous amount of polish to 
> the project. I'm not saying that your "internal" player will only be 
> good because of this, but rather that'll it will add a tremendous amount 
> of sex appeal to Myth.
> 

It's all about the WAF. My wife likes things to be consistent and 
orderly..  Picture this conversation:

w: "Why doesn't this work the same as the tv stuff?"
m: "Because Myth uses another program to play DVDs."
w: "Well why doesn't it just do the same thing as it does for TV."
m: "It's complicated, the bottom line is it's not been important enough 
for any to sit down and write it."
w: "Well why don't YOU do it?"
m: "Yes dear"

;)

It turned out not to be difficult at all. After mucking around with the 
sample programs and getting a feel for the API I pulled down source for 
Kaffine and discovered they had a Qt widget that implemented the 
nessesary callbacks for Xine to output to it.

After that it was a matter of removing all the KDE cruft and changing 
some things around in the way they did things here and there.

There's lots of nifty things we could do with this.  MythMusic could use 
  it for it's playback engine and leverage the visualizations Xine has, 
though we'd either have to port our existing ones or lose them.  But 
we'd gain the advantage of the audio playback & visualizations being 
actively worked on by another team thus allow Myth folks to focus on 
Myth things.

At some point I want to explore using the widget as a background for 
some of the theme menus ala Tivo...  I *think* it'd be fairly trivial to 
do implement in code, creating the background mpegs might be another story.