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

[Joseph A. Caputo]

On Wednesday 07 January 2004 08:51, J. Donavan Stanley wrote:
> 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.


How does this approach tie in with the Myth keybindings, etc?  I'm just 
curious because I think it's a great idea, but why use xine-lib (other 
than the obvious reason that you get DVD menu navigation)?  I'd have 
thought it would be much easier to just use Myth's natvie player (which 
can theoretically play any multimedia format supported by ffmpeg/
libavcodec/libavformat) (try 'mythtv <filename>') and tweak it to 
handle playing files external to Myth (i.e., no Myth metadata in the 
database, like resolution, and no Myth seektable).


-JAC