[mythtv-users] Playback with xine?

Nick Rout nick.rout at gmail.com
Wed Feb 11 21:51:42 UTC 2009


On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 10:06 AM, Robert McNamara
<robert.mcnamara at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> *sets mind to thinking* - is it logical to restrict users to Internal
>> for recordings when freedom of choice is give in mythvideo?
>
> External players for recordings/Live TV is the LAST thing I would want
> to see, personally.  I'd be happier seeing external player support go
> away in MythVideo.  I've made the case for such before but (as I am
> likely about to hear) people would fuh-reak out.
>
> External player support is a legacy option from when the internal
> player had limited codec and container support.  In many MANY ways
> now, the internal player is more capable than even mplayer, and
> maintains the look and feel of myth throughout.  There are lots of
> people who use (or moved in the past to) an external player because of
> this reason, or because of a tiny bit of extra speed you can eke out
> of a player with a more limited OSD/which does not read-write a
> seektable/etc.  With the dawning of multithreaded/hardware accelerated
> playback, this is becoming less and less relevant.    Then there's the
> crowd who have minor issues with a container format (I'm looking at
> *you*, MKV) who switch to get proper seeking *without* ever making an
> effort to get the seeking fixed in MythTV (the MKV file is
> semi-broken, a stream copy into a fresh container will fix seeking).
> Yeah, I have some strong feelings on the matter.  I'd love to see the
> external player support done away with entirely when playback becomes
> trivial.
>
> Oh, and I want to see framegrabber support/support for PVR-350 video
> out go away too.
>
> FLAME ON!
>
> Robert
>

Likewise I knew my post would not be uncontroversial :-)

I tried to switch mythvideo to Internal some time ago and it didn't
work for a significant number of avi files let alone mkv's, so I
swiched back to mplayer. My system probably is underpowered, but it
largely works and will cost real money to replace (hardware is
relatively more expensive in NZ)

mplayer also has the advantage that, for example, I can use a special
setting for h.264 files that make them play smoother (at the expense
of some fine detail I expect). Those sort of tweaks do not appear
possible using Internal.

Also nice tweaks like Brad's 200 dvd changer
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/370310#370310 are
only possible because mythvideo allows you to allocate arbitrary
"player" scripts to filetypes.

For that sort of reason I prefer to see mythvideo retain a choice. but
thats not to say I don't appreciate the dev's efforts to make Internal
a better and more universal player.

Nick.


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