[mythtv-users] MythTV Frontend for Android released on Market

[Nick Rout]

On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 3:48 PM, Raymond Wagner <raymond at wagnerrp.com> wrote:
> On 2/27/2012 21:32, Nick Rout wrote:
>> On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 2:46 PM, Raymond Wagner<raymond at wagnerrp.com>  wrote:
>>> On 2/27/2012 12:29, Mike Chinander wrote:
>>>> Would it be possible to use an external player?
>>> MythTV only supports external players for playback when using MythVideo,
>>> and then they are largely useless since they don't support the myth://
>>> URIs used by Storage Group content.  Recordings never have, and likely
>>> never will, support external players.
>> He's talking about the android frontend ...users
>
> That's what I was thinking at first, but were that the case, why would
> anyone want to use an external player in the first place?  Any sensible
> frontend for a mobile device would be written using the necessary APIs
> to access the video decoding hardware.

Well there are good bad and indifferent players for android, and good
bad and indifferent hardware acceleration on different machines, quite
different than an iThing.

mpeg2 seems to be the forgotten codec on many small devices, as h264
is all the rage. That doesn't help when you want to play mpeg2 TV.

I think all this makes it harder than it should be to just "use the
necessary api" (But you probably know all that, in fact you will
probably correct my ignorance, which only scratches the surface).

Now vplayer, which Mike Chinander was suggesting, is certainly one of
the better all round android players. Thats why it seems to me that
perhaps a upnp app which can hand off to any player you like is better
than some all seeing all doing android frontend.

bubbleupnp and vplayer seems to do the trick for me and many others.
But I just don't see the point in my case as it's only in the house I
have sufficient bandwidth, and there I may as well watch the 55 or 32
inch screens.

Now a tablet size screen might sometimes make sense.