[mythtv-users] Changing default player to vlc doesn't take.

[A. F. Cano]

Hi,

New myth installation on an ECS Liva/Debian Jessie (Myth 0.27.4+fixes from
deb-multimedia).  This was a minimal installation, no add-ons and left all
defaults as much as possible.  The video files go into /video/mythtv.

Since I discovered that vlc can play at higher speeds without cutting off
the sound (what a time saver for talk shows!) the default player seems
crippled, so I looked around and found this:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1560009

but it's 5 years old so I suspect the problems discussed shouldn't apply.

This official page:

https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/VLC

gives the procedure.  I tried both: "vlc file://%s vlc://quit" and
"vlc %s vlc://quit" (Setup -> Media Settings -> Videos Settings ->
Player Settings: Default Player): Same result.  The change didn't
seem to take, the default/builtin player is still used.  I don't want
to hard-wire any of the vlc options as described in this page; vlc
works just fine as it is outside of myth.  Myth works just fine with
the default/internal player.

What am I missing?  I see no error messages being generated by either the
frontend or backend.  Is anyone running vlc as the default player
successfully?

Thanks for any help.

A.

PS: I'm really happy with the performance of the Liva.  I'm currently using
a so-so monitor (1280x1024) but I can't max out cpu usage even when watching
1080i at higher speeds than normal (with vlc).  The kernel seems to do a great
job using the 2 cores (per the kde system load viewer applet).  1080i with
the default player also leaves some cpu headroom.  I gather that the meterial
is being transcoded on the fly to the lower (720p) resolution I can display.
Compared to the old system (1.4GHz single core and nvidia 4200 GPU) that
couldn't keep up with 720p, this is a vast improvement.  I only have one
tuner (OTA) but the backend is also on this system.