[mythtv-users] External Player Demise Clarification (WAS: easiest way to go from storage groups internal player to mplayer)

[Chris Pinkham]

* On Tue May 18, 2010 at 08:03:36AM -0400, Scott Russell wrote:
> > 
> > Just because code is written doesn't mean keeping it costs nothing.
> > In order to improve MythTV and plugins, we need to get rid of some of

> Code reduction is a good thing and Internal player has improved
> significantly in quality since in 0.23-fixes since I first tried it
> in 0.21. However, my personal yardstick is how well it does with DVD
> navigation (playback is typically glitch free in 0.23-fixes) and in this
> area Internal player still crashes more frequently than Xine.

I wanted to step in and clarify something since this issue has come up
several times at least in recent months.

We are _not_ planning on getting rid of the ability to play videos
via an external player.  We _are_ planning on getting rid of the
overly-complex configuration related to allowing an infinite number of
external players based on the file extension.  Basically what this
means is that all the setup related to special players for .avi, .mpg,
.flv, .mkv, etc. will go away and you'll essentially just have a
single 'External Player' setting.  When you play back a video/dvd/etc,
you'll play it in the internal player or (via a menu button) optionally
play it in _the_ "External Player".  In this scenario, if for some
reason you want to play .mkv files in mplayer, but .avi in xine, you'll
need to set your "External Player" to a shell script that looks at the
extension of the file and runs the desired program.  If someone decides
to write up a fancy perl/php/etc. "External Player" script to handle
this decision or make it easier for people to make their own decision,
then that script can be uploaded to the wiki for all benefit.

This was discussed again last night in the #mythtv developers channel,
so this is the current plan.

That being said, we still have a ways to go before this happens.
We still want to get remote DVD and BD playback functioning (both .iso
and VIDEO_TS / BDMV directories) before we start slimming down the
external player code.  The plan is to be able to have a DVD/BD image or
file structure sitting in a Storage Group on a backend and be able to
play that via Myth's remote protocol over the network.  That's our
big hurdle right now for allowing full use of remote Storage Groups with
MythVideo.

--
Chris