[mythtv-users] XBMC + Myth = ?? Was:Comcast Cable encrypted channels

[Alan Marchiori]

On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 3:00 PM, Alan Marchiori<alan at alanmarian.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 2:54 PM, Christopher
> Meredith<chmeredith at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 3:12 PM, Greg Estabrooks <greg at phaze.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> > Well I'm sold on at least trying PlayON running on a VM on my backend
>>> > with XBMC as my frontend.  My question is will there be problems with
>>> > XBMC and myth on the same box?  I assume there are going to be some
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>  Myth provides it's own copy of ffmpeg and has it's own build in upnp
>>> libaries so those wont conflict at all.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> > packages they both use (maybe ffmpeg or upnp libs.. etc?) what are the
>>> > chances just installing XBMC will break my myth setup?
>>>
>>>
>>>  Practically 0 chance.
>>>  I'd say give it a go :)
>>
>> Same here. XBMC is almost entirely self-contained. Even if you build XBMC
>> from source (*highly recommended*) you won't need any extra packages except
>> dev packages.
>>
>
>
> Sounds good... hopefully it is as simple as apt-get install XMBC (or
> whatever the package is).... the only question is why didn't I know
> about this before now?? :)   I've been waiting for even a half-way
> decent way to get netflix on demand with myth.  Although this isn't
> exactly an optimal solution, if it works I'll be very happy.  Hulu/etc
> integration is also a good bonus.
>

As predicted everything went fine.  XBMC does support 64bit with their
apt distribution.  I also got the playOn server working with hulu and
netflix with little problems.  It is actually pretty nice (I was
expecting less).  For now I'm running it on a core2 laptop @ 1.5GHz
and it uses 50-60% CPU while playing SD-like resolution.  My main
complaint is the video from netflix looks a little fuzzy to me.  I'm
not sure if this is the source or the transcoding by playOn but I
think analog captures from my PVR-150 are of better quality. FFWD is
maybe about 5x max.  Rewind doesn't work at all.

After playing around I'm thinking the best way to do this would be to
have a upnp client tuner for the backend.  Then the backend would
"record" the upnp streams just like it does with any other capture
card.  Then playback would be just like any other source.  The upnp
tuner would populate its "channels" by making a single channel for
each video on the upnp device that starts now() and repeats forever.
Seems easy enough, right? :)