[mythtv] [RFC] MythNews Multimedia Support

[Kevin Kuphal]

I have been working recently to patch MythNews to support multimedia 
aspects of RSS.  So far I have added

* Support for display of <image> tag on a feed including caching image 
locally
* Improved HTML parsing of descriptions by not stripping everything in 
tags or CDATA sections
* Support for display of <media:thumbnail> tag on an article
* Launching mplayer for streaming <enclosure> and <media:player> tags 
(only tested with video)
* Added video sources for the below video sites

Right now it works well enough to display video from YouTube, Google 
Video, G4TV and Cnet TV.  With a recent version of mplayer the streaming 
works. 

Issues:

* Sometimes mplayer takes a long time to set up streaming and I don't 
know a good way to check the status of a shelled command (help here 
would be appreciated) to either show information about it or kill it if 
it hangs
* The Internal player can play the files just fine if downloaded but I 
don't know how to use it to stream from HTTP sources

Future:

* Testing both audio and video enclosures
* Graphical indicators on the feed display of the presence of an 
enclosure and it's type
* Dynamic thumbnail display that can change height/width to handle 
different thumbnail sizes
* Subscription to feeds so that enclosures can be downloaded locally for 
playback instead of streaming (I could use some advice here as well.  
Should this be integrated to "Watch Recordings" or done only via 
MythNews where it just locally plays instead of streams if available).

I'd love some comments on this patch.  It seems a very natural extension 
to MythNews and with the popularity of podcasts and services like 
YouTube it should be a nice enhancement.

Thanks,
Kevin
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