[mythtv-users] How to play audio CDs?

[Jim Stichnoth]

On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 9:54 AM, Jim Stichnoth <stichnot at gmail.com> wrote:
> Here are my problems so far getting myth to play audio CDs with
> positive WAF.  The system is a single-core ION, ALSA set up for stereo
> analog output, and an external USB DVD drive.

I just got an internal SATA DVD drive to try, instead of the external
USB drive.  This improves things slightly.

> MythMusic.  Starts playing, goes about 10 seconds (with no activity on
> the drive LED), then pauses about 10 seconds (with the drive LED
> active), repeats a couple of times, finally stops playing altogether.
> Logs complain about audio buffer underruns, not surprisingly.

Same problem with the SATA drive.  There is drive light activity while
the buffer fills, then drive activity stops during playback, then
playback stops while the buffer refills, etc.  Feels like a lock is
preventing multithreading.  But even if this were fixed, the user
interface has poor WAF.  "Press 3, then arrow down to CD, press
select, press exit."

> mplayer cdda:// .  Similar alternating between playback and waiting.

Same problem with the SATA drive.

> xine cdda:// . Doesn't play at all.

This works fine now.

> grip (as suggested by Yan Seiner).  Looks OK, displaying the track
> names, but I just get silence while it is supposedly playing (with the
> playback time indicator progressing normally without pauses).  Also, I
> have doubts about whether it supports lirc.

I didn't pursue this any further because I don't think it does lirc.

> Maybe I'll try vlc next, unless there are other suggestions.

Vlc works, except for some reason it's not showing CDDB information
for album and track information like all the other players.  Maybe it
was built without cddb support?  Or contacting a different server that
doesn't know this particular CD?  "yum list vlc" gives this:
Installed Packages
vlc.i386       1.0.3-1.fc10        @rpmfusion-free-updates

So for now, I'm planning to use xine.  I'm launching it through a menu
item like this:
<button>
<type>MUSIC_PLAY</type>
<text>Play Audio CD</text>
<action>EXEC xine -pwq --auto-scan=cd</action>
</button>
However, the UI with the controls (and in particular, showing the
track and elapsed time) is always appearing behind the mythfrontend
window.  If I use -pfwq, a (useless) visualization window shows up,
but not the UI window I want to see.  Any suggestions on how to change
this?

Jim