[mythtv-users] remote viewing/UPnP question

[Ross Boylan]

Short-term goal: View TV shows recorded on my Debian GNU/Linux box with
mythtv on a Windows Vista laptop (which is connected to my TV).  myth is
running in a chroot.

Educational goal: Understand the underlying networking and technologies
(UPnP, DLNA, zeroconf, mdns) better, at least well enough to solve my
immediate problems.

Longer-term goal: View TV using a dedicated myth front end.

I've taken a couple of runs at accessing myth remotely, but have yet to
succeed.  Some of the docs I read confused me.  In particular,
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/UPnP says "Make sure you have a route for
239.0.0.0/8 out your lan nic BEFORE mythbackend starts (route add -net
239.0.0.0/8 eth0). It seems it won't work if you add the route later."

But other material suggests that isn't the only IP range that needs
special handling.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Plug_and_Play
says that version 1.1 references http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3927
which in turn refers to 169.254.*.*.  And the discussion of multicast at
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Multicast-HOWTO-2.html says 224.0.0.* is for
management of the multicast 239.*.*.* addresses.

Since I'm running DHCP perhaps some or all of this is not relevant to
me.  But I'm wondering if taking care of routing and firewalling 239.*
is adequate.  Also, do I need to fiddle with the Vista firewall?

Do I need to do something with IPs other than 239.0.0.*?

I discovered that mysql was set for remote mythtv logins, but granted no
privileges to them.  I have corrected that, and verified that mysql is
bound to a local IP address (192.168.40.x).

I have 2 NICs, one for the local network and one for the outside world.
I have permissive firewall rules within the local network, but only for
the 192.168.40.* IPs.  I have not done anything special for any of the
239.*, 169.254.*, or 224.0.0.* IPs in the firewall or routing.  I think
that means they get routed to my NIC for external networks.  Maybe they
are routed there and then killed by the firewall.

My server connects to the laptop through a wireless router.  Do I need
to set anything in the router so that it will handle non-192.168.40.*
IPs?

I tried using Vista's Media Center (WMC) and Media Player (WMP) to
access the recordings.  I think they do UPnP, though the information
I've found is sketchy.  Does anyone know if they work?  If they don't I
can install xbmc.  Apparently a windows version of the current myth (I'm
running 0.25.2 from Marillat's repos) is not available.

It looks as if myth's server can serve files directly from the
recordings (there is a setup screen that asks you to pick
music/video/recordings for UPnP--I'm not sure why it's only one, but I
set if for recordings).  Some material indicates I need to set up a
video directory, which I have not done.  It would be empty anyway.  Some
of that material says I need to configure the external machine name in
the folder location, and I see no way to do that.

WMC and WMP do not detect any media servers as far as I can tell.
avahi-discover running on my linux box also does not report any sign of
myth.

The recordings are directly accessible from the laptop via samba.  Aside
from the browsing situation being bad because there are a ton of files
with names that do not reveal their content (I ran the mythfrontend on
my linux system to find a show and its file name), playing files hasn't
worked out.  WMC crashed after a short play (but then again, it does
that even for its own files).  The media player played the show I
selected, but gave me the Spanish audio track and no way I could find to
change the track.

Finally, some of the TV's I might get say they do DLNA.  Does that mean
they will work with UPnP, or is something more required?  I realize that
even if they work the experience won't be great.

Thanks for any help you can provide.
Ross Boylan