[mythtv] IPTV project - 'officially' starting

[Paul Wayper]

Hi everyone!

I've seen a fair number of posts for the last couple of months about 
increasing interest in IPTV - receiving e.g. mpeg2 streams as UDP multicast. 
I haven't seen anyone put up their hand and say "I'm organising this", though, 
and in the spirit of Open Source, I'm putting up my hand and saying it.  If 
there's someone who's already out there coding this, I haven't seen anything 
about it.

I'm still looking for some documentation on how to coordinate such a project, 
so if one of the regular developers can drop me a line on their suggestions 
then I'd appreciate it.  I have an existing subversion server set up on my 
gateway machine and I'll probably set up something on that, but any 
suggestions as to how to integrate this with the MythTV codebase and 
subversion server would be great.  I'd hate to do a lot of work and then have 
it be hard to integrate into the actual codebase.

My plan is to make a subclass of each of the RecorderBase and ChannelBase, 
specifically to handle the multicast stream.  I'll have to work out where the 
channel data goes in the database - I believe the correct thing to do is to 
put it in an existing table rather than a new one.  I'm also assuming that at 
some stage I'll have to set up a bit of GUI for the user to input channel data 
in the backend setup and so forth.

I'm not very qualified for doing this - I have limited C++ experience (I 
mostly code in C and Perl) and I don't have access to IPTV channels from my 
ISP.  (I live in Canberra .au, and one of our ISPs does do this, but not mine 
- yet).  But I am enthusiastic, I can see that the interest is there and I 
think it really just needs someone to start the work.  Once I've got as far as 
I can go, then I'll ask people for help on specific things - my local linux 
group may be interested in helping, for instance.

Anyway, any advice you can give me at this early stage would be very much 
appreciated.  And anyone that's already doing something like this, then please 
let me know so we can work together!

Thanks in advance,

Paul