[mythtv-users] Web access to MythTV

Chris Petersen lists at forevermore.net
Thu Jun 24 17:45:50 EDT 2004


> My wife suggested the most direct solution is to have a web based
> control system of myth that gives you access to all the features. That
> way the users could just use their existing solution to access there
> myth front end to play a movie, start their play list, pick a show to
> watch on cable.

Unfortunately, that'd require adding protocol handlers.. 
mythfrontend://something...  mythmusic://something...  and there's no
real easy way to do that, since I believe it's controlled by the window
environment (gnome, kde, etc) and there are a lot of those.

There *is* something like this with the dsmyth plugin for Windows,
though.  It will open recorded programs directly with a myth:// url
straight from the web interface.  Won't do live TV, etc., but supposedly
works great with recorded programs.

> The audible menus modules sound like a great idea however I don't know
> how much work that would be.

Could be as simple as calling a console text to speech app, if there is
such a thing easily compiled for linux (festvox is probably the answer,
but I don't know if there is an easy `speak "foo"` kind of interface for
it).

> The issues I see would be the dvd menus and backed
> up dvd media with menus. Does Myth extract the menu information and
> display it on its own?

I'm pretty sure that myth just uses mplayer to play DVD's.  You are
correct about the menus.  Worse than that, there's no "alt" text like
there would be with a web page, so the only way to get at the text would
be to use an OCR.  There's also no guarantee that the menu links even
contain any words for an OCR to look at -- could just have an icon of a
scene, etc.

Blind people are probably SOL regarding dvd menus until the DVD industry
realizes that blind people enjoy listening to movies and creates a
standard for including audio hints on menu items in the same way they
create closed captioning (and same-language subtitles) for the deaf.

-Chri



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