General > Developers
Myth MD/Orbiter
dopey:
Hi All,
First, let me start off saying I'm not trying to start a "this app is better" argument. That does not belong in this thread.
I'm coming back to this project, after being absent for a number of years. Now I'm considering making some changes, but curious as to what others think of that direction I'm considering. I'm especially curious if anyone else has thought of or starting doing this before.
Also, if anyone can help point me to "areas of interest" for me to study and read, I'd much appreciate it. Right now, the design I'm about to go over is a concept only and I've only just begun looking at what it would entail to accomplish... I haven't even setup my LMCE dev VM yet.
Throughout the years of this project (how wonderful is it that I can say that) the one thing that annoyed me the most is the Myth TV integration with LinuxMCE. To watch Live TV you had to wait for this behemoth of an app to load, and LMCE's connection to Myth has been finicky at best. Plus, you have to consider, it takes some much time for Myth to load, because it's loading a lot of the stuff LinuxMCE is already handling.
When I first started looking at LinuxMCE, the Myth Internal Player was still new and often overridden on purpose, but that's not true anymore. That internal player can now run circles around the Xine player that LinuxMCE uses by default, plus MythUI allows you to spawn/overlay video windows wherever you want, display pictures, play audio, etc.
It then occurred to me that MythTV is actually very feature complete; and would have everything a HA system needs or would ever want, if only Myth had a plugin for a LMCE Orbiter, inside MythTV itself; and MythTV acted as the MD. Then Mythfrontend (or perhaps a separate app that utilizes the MythUI API) would be opened when ObiterGL is called. Myth would then be responsible for handling all audio, video, and text notifications (Myth already has this functionality); and sending/responding to commands to/from the DCERouter (what it seems mainly needs to be added).
Doing this would replace the picture viewer, Xine, and gallery devices; so MythTV would handle all commands previously sent to those devices. I think this is probably the main area that I would need to study up on first.
Before I even start going down this route, does anyone see any political issues that would cause me problems (such as licensing, rival devs, etc.)? This does sound like it would take a considerable amount of time, so I want to be reasonably sure I'm not going to be stopped halfway. I'm also hoping there's other developer interest in doing something like this.
Marie.O:
Feel free - there are no licence issues.
Let me say just a single thing on this topic, after that I shall refrain from visiting this thread again: You won't succeed. You will probably burn endless hours. And in the end, you will give up. Sounds harsh. Yep.
dopey:
Okay, interesting response. Why do you think this won't succeed? At this point it's just a concept, so if there's good reason why this shouldn't happen, then I'd like to hear it.
You are right though, I most certainly won't succeed if the existing developers don't really care about this and I get no direction from them.
tschak909:
Everything that you want to do, is possible, and those of us who can help, will help point you in the direction you need to go. Feel free to stop by #linuxmce-devel on freenode IRC.
You will need to study DCE devices, how they work, and build your own simple DCE device (see Developing a DCE device), so you can understand the interaction.
Once this is done, you'll need to study the interaction of Plugins with the DCE router, as you'll need to understand this, for handling the MediaStream object and its friends.
Once you understand this, you can then look at the MythTV Player, and see how it interacts with the existing mythTV, you can choose to keep this mechanism, or embed libMyth into MythTV Player (in actuality, the first version of MythTV literally embedded libmyth directly.)
Do you have the patience? :)
-Thom
B34N:
Dopey,
As a user, I would love to see better integration with MythTV. I've been working to integrate LMCE for a few years and have not gotten it to where I would like it. The biggest thing I'm missing is a fully functioning MythTV offering. I like the LMCE interface but find it difficult to view recorded shows in chronological order and then easily delete them after watching. I will submit that it's probably my lack of expertise is why I haven't yet gotten a LMCE system doing what I want which is not much more than MythTV plus Z-wave controls. While I've been close a few times to moving to another solutions, I would prefer to use LMCE and then expand to it's other features such as security and real home automation...not just turning lights off and on using timers.
B34N
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