[mythtv] IPTV

[Daniel Kristjansson]

On Mon, 2010-01-11 at 09:40 +0000, Zacarias Benta wrote:
> Hello you guys,
> 
> I have used the freebox recorder together with VLC to create a proof
> of concept in wich I state that mythtv can be used for IPTV.
> Are there any plans for the continuation of freebox in mythtv and the
> creation of some kind feature for encrypted IPTV streams?

No, the IPTV in MythTV was contributed by some guys in France using
FreeBox, which uses unencrypted streams. This code could use some
love, it really only works reliably if you have a single IPTV stream.
I don't see the point in encrypting the streams if you plan to use
them with MythTV, which will store the files unencrypted. Maybe you
can fill us in a little on what your use case is?

We use Live555 to read the streams, so it can actually handle a wide
variety of streams. The complication with Live555 is that it is a single
threaded event driven library and we create a thread for each recorder.
If you want to work on the IPTV support, it might be a good idea to
first resync our Live555 library with upstream and fix any regressions
and then create a single event loop thread shared by all IPTV recorders
in MythTV which handles the interaction with the Live555 library. That
should fix all the backend problems with IPTV in MythTV.

For the frontend we really need a better way to browse through
external IPTV video libraries. What we have right now works well
with IPTV services that emulate the old fashioned cable TV 'channel'
model, but it doesn't work well with video on demand style IPTV
services. I don't think anyone has really cracked that nut so it
would be an interesting project. There are plenty of services, but
there you basically have the preselected videos, videos related to
what you just watched, browse through an unmanageably large library,
and search; but what you need is something that uses MythTV style
'recording rules' to find programming you might be interested in
and allow you to browse those in something like the 'Watch Recordings'
UI. Ideally this would all be done within the existing screens, so
dealing with IPTV is just like dealing with recordings as far as
the end user is concerned.

-- Daniel