[mythtv-users] Launch internal player from shell?

Michael T. Dean mtdean at thirdcontact.com
Sat Jun 23 16:37:33 UTC 2007


On 06/23/2007 10:11 AM, Peter Schachte wrote:
> Is it possible to launch Myth's internal player from a shell script?

There's the mythtv test application, but its use is not supported, and
it's not designed for this (it's designed to test playback at a much
higher level--not for perfect playback).  And, I don't know if it would
work well for DVD's/ISO's (don't know if it would figure out what's
happening).

>   I've done
> some googling and searched gossamer threads, but haven't found any promising leads.
>
> The reason I want to do this is that I have some videos I've archived to DVD,
> and I've written a shell script to prompt the user to insert the appropriate
> DVD and, when the disk is inserted, launch a player.  I'm currently launching
> mplayer, but I'd rather fix my script to use the configured player, and I don't
> know what to do if the configured player is "Internal."
>
> Also, is there a way to pop up a simple dialog from a shell script with the
> current myth theme's look?

Not without hacking Myth.  And, really, when combined with the offline
storage idea, it would be best to hack MythVideo.

>   I'd rather not have to write C++ code.  Either an
> OSD overlay or myth popup (like the "finished watching a recording" one) or
> even a full screen dialog?  I just need to display a message like "Please
> insert Myth Archive Disk 3", and a cancel button.  Then I need to keep trying
> to mount the DVD drive, and when that succeeds I need to pop down the dialog.
> I'm currently using zenity, and killing the zenity process when the disk is
> inserted.  It works OK, but doesn't look very good.
>
> BTW, I have seen Mike Dean's script posted a while back doing something
> similar; in fact, I started from that.  But his scripts were developed before
> myth archive, which works very well for burning the disks.  IIRC, Mike used an
> xterm to display the dialog,

Yeah.  Very ugly, but functional.  I had planned to integrate offline
archival into MythVideo, but still haven't gotten around to it.  It fell
way down on my priority list (especially when I started thinking that
all of MythVideo should be integrated into mythbackend/mythfrontend).  I
still may do it as most of the structure would be applicable even if
MythVideo becomes part of the core.

>  and mplayer to play the video.
>   

Basically.  I actually used xine, but for your purposes, it's the same.

Mike


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