[mythtv-users] Popcorn Hour Unit as VIdeo Output?

[jedi]

On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 04:11:25PM -0500, Robert Kulagowski wrote:
> jedi wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 04:32:49PM -0400, R. G. Newbury wrote:
> >> An article in this month's Linux Journal is a review of the Popcorn Hour 
> >> A-100 Media Tank. A paperback sized box with an embedded (linux??) 
> >> control program, intended to play all sorts of video formats, and 
> >> apparently capable of doing 1080p with ease, for $200.
> >>
> >> The corporate site is at popcornhour.com. A newer unit with better 
> >> capabilities is now available for $215.
> >>
> >> A review is at http://www.tvtechnology.com/article/68576
> >>
> >> This unit can stream videos, with or without an internal hard drive.
> >>
> >> Does anyone have one of these? Could it be set up and left in a ready 
> >> state to stream videos from mythtv...in effect as a video card?
> >>
> >> The output capabilities of this box, *if reasonably usable with mythtv* 
> >> could sidestep a lot of video problems.
> > 
> >     You still have to deal with video with commercials embedded in them.
> > If you're really keen on how MythTV skips through those, and how it 
> > presents everything then the popcorn hour is interesting but not quite
> > there yet.
> 
> If the PH is used to display video, then some out-of-band message needs 
> to get from whereever you're watching to the backend saying something 
> like "skip 180 seconds".  Pretend that the PH is just reading a 
> continuous stream of video; don't use PnP from the PH to request a skip, 
> because AFAIK there's no mechanism to do that using the PnP protocol.
> 
> Is that what you mean?


    It's more like... "here's a file" and "skip these parts if you want to".
Although the mechanics of it could be handled a number of ways I suppose. If
the PH can't skip around content easily (forwards, backwards and whatever) 
then I would see that a usability issue. But yeah, it seems to be a general
"protocol level" problem. Although it seems like it would be easy enough to
cook up an external file format to handle the data in a manner similar to
subtitle files.

    BTW, how does a PH handle external subtitle files anyways?