[mythtv] MythTV on Windows

[Charles Mason]

Hi All,

> I've been working on Windows port of MythTV for some time, and I finally
> have something to show. Instead of using Cygwin as attempted in the past, I
> switched completely to MinGW, implemented Direct3D-based video renderer
> (which works fine in Vista, as opposed to DirectX overlays) and Windows
> audio, made tons of small corrections (some of them are actual MythTV bugs).


I have just tried the binary of the early windows port of MythTV on my
Vista 3.2 gig P4. Firstly I have to say its a big step forwards. As
good a linux is many users have mac and windows boxes on the same
network, which up until now were unable to use mythtv. The best I
could do was to use Tapeworm, Samaba and VLC to at least let me watch
recordings on my windows machine. Having the full front end is much
better.

I realise its fairly early code but I have a couple of questions.
Firstly how do you change the relative path it uses to find the base
mythtv directory. At present I had to recreate
C:\MinGW\home\tanasa\mythtv_rel on my machine to get it to find themes
and the like?

Secondly I have problems running mythtv.exe Most of my experience
comes through running mythfrontend.exe directly. What does mythtv.exe
do how does it relate to mythfrontend and mythbackend. When I run
mythtv.exe, mythfrontend appears to load briefly then the screen goes
black and nothing happens. If I look at the console output its
constantly printing out the below two lines.

           2007-12-05 18:11:32.576 couldn't find base dialog
           Non-recursive mutex already locked by this thread


When I run mythfrontend.exe, I get a few errors about missing pieces
of theme, but on the whole the gui works ok. When I try and play a
recording or live tv the frame rate is really low, but the CPU usage
is only around 30% so its certainly not running out of CPU time. The
sound is fine but keeps repeating little chunks of audio to keep it in
sync with the really slow video. The video is slow if I select directx
or direct3d as the output method.

I shall have a bit more of play with it and see if I can work our why
the video is so slow. If you want any more info about how it performs
let me know. I would be interested in testing any future versions you
make. Hopefully in the not too distant future we can have a pretty
installer for the windows version of the MythTV fronted.

Keep up the good work.

Charlie