[mythtv-users] Launch internal player from shell?

[Peter Schachte]

Hi,

Is it possible to launch Myth's internal player from a shell script?  I've done
some googling and searched gossamer threads, but haven't found any promising leads.

The reason I want to do this is that I have some videos I've archived to DVD,
and I've written a shell script to prompt the user to insert the appropriate
DVD and, when the disk is inserted, launch a player.  I'm currently launching
mplayer, but I'd rather fix my script to use the configured player, and I don't
know what to do if the configured player is "Internal."

Also, is there a way to pop up a simple dialog from a shell script with the
current myth theme's look?  I'd rather not have to write C++ code.  Either an
OSD overlay or myth popup (like the "finished watching a recording" one) or
even a full screen dialog?  I just need to display a message like "Please
insert Myth Archive Disk 3", and a cancel button.  Then I need to keep trying
to mount the DVD drive, and when that succeeds I need to pop down the dialog.
I'm currently using zenity, and killing the zenity process when the disk is
inserted.  It works OK, but doesn't look very good.

BTW, I have seen Mike Dean's script posted a while back doing something
similar; in fact, I started from that.  But his scripts were developed before
myth archive, which works very well for burning the disks.  IIRC, Mike used an
xterm to display the dialog, and mplayer to play the video.

Thanks in advance for any pointers you can give.

-- 
Peter Schachte              I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, [my child]
schachte at cs.mu.OZ.AU        will come to me and say 'Daddy, where were you
www.cs.mu.oz.au/~schachte/  when they took freedom of the press away from
Phone: +61 3 8344 1338      the Internet?' -- Mike Godwin