[mythtv-users] using WinTV PVR-350 to play AM/FM radio? (slightly OT)

Jeff Simpson jeffsimpson at alum.wpi.edu
Tue Apr 4 19:17:07 UTC 2006


>
> do you have keyboard shortcuts on?


I could have accidentally hit tab and kept typing. Who knows, it happens
sometimes.

I disagree somewhat in the playback ideas. I do agree that exporting
> to portable media devices should definitely be a big part of this, I
> would even extend that idea to make it possible to stream to those
> networked audio player device things (I don't have one, but I can see
> this being a great feature).


I just didn't want this seemingly-simple idea get too bloated before it even
starts. Once we get started on the perils of inventing Yet Another MP3
Player and integrating it into myth, it becomes a very large project. (yeah,
I agree, it makes sense for recordings of radio to be in with recordings of
TV, since they are both recordings, but at the same time, music (mp3) and
radio are also very similar, and mythmusic and the like already have info
display and visualizations built in.

Anyway, I have my MythTV setup connected to my hometheatre which
> doubles as my "stereo", so *I* would want to have a nice interface for
> playing back radio this way, as well, many people have remote
> frontends in rooms without radios, so even if you are playing it back
> through the TV its better than nothing. In that regard, I don't see
> organization and playback of recorded radio needing to be much
> different than how TV is handled. I think the current Watch Recordings
> area is a fine layout for Radio, you could even replace the Preview
> picture with an image associated with the show (cause everyone loves
> eye candy!).


Since it doubles as your stereo, I'm sure you can also see the need for an
easy to use and well designed music player as well. If mythmusic were as
intuitive as the watch-recordings menu is, people would actually use it.
Imagine having the ability to scroll through recorded FM, mp3s, audio CDs,
and even shoutcast and other internet streams. A shoutcast stream is not
much different from recorded FM when you think about it. You can group media
into "where you got it from" or "what you'll do with it" and come up with
"recorded" and "library" and "watch" and "listen-to". Either one seems like
a good way to group them, but one puts radio in with tv because you recorded
it, the other puts radio in with mp3s because you listen to them.

But I digress, more importantly than how to playback the recorded radio is
how to schedule and record it. I think we should start simple, just creating
the functionality of scheduling a station by frequency, a duration, and have
it save the recording to an mp3 or m4a file. Once we have that working, I
imagine there will be a large following of people who just use that by
itself, and from there we can work on an interface. Function before form in
this case, I say, so that we get some momentum in the project before giving
up on it (rather than just manufacturing screenshots that don't work).

So back to the scheduling thing.... I looked over that publicradiofan
> page and its great, easily scrapable. I'm willing to bet we could even
> work with the site's maintainer to develop an easier, less server
> intensive method to grab the station information. The fellow, Kevin
> Kelly is an MIT professor, Math and Computer Science, will probably
> enjoy the project!
>

I agree it would be great to be able to select which public radio stations
come in and then browse through radio programs to record, but even just the
record-by-time is a huge leap in capabilities for the mythbox.

Even with just this information I bet most peoples needs would be met,
> and regardless would be a great start. Along with a method for
> inserting manual recording times it would at least get the project
> started and allow people to take advantage.


Exactly, I think so long as we start simple it shouldn't be impossible.

What we need now is to have someone who knows what they are doing look
> at the Myth source to see what it would take to have the current
> scheduler work with radio stations. I'd assume new routines for
> tuning, etc would be needed, but as long as the scheduler knows
> whether a show is a radio show or tv show I can't imagine the rest
> being difficult...


I think step one would be trying to record radio outside myth (just like
step one in setting
up myth is getting the capture cards to work outside of myth). Once we can
create an
environment where we can easily start/stop recordings of set frequencies to
files, we can
add on scheduling and all the myth integration that we'll need.

Is anyone currently using a radio card to record radio? and if so, what
programs are you using?

Also, now that I think about it, what radio card will be supported? As far
as I know, there isn't a
standard interface for radio cards, I've just been assuming that we'll use
an ivtv supported radio
device like the PVR cards from hauppauge.

 - Jeff
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/attachments/20060404/202f6f73/attachment.htm 


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list