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

[phenigma]

I will work with anyone that wishes to help improve the MythTV experience in LMCE to integrate their work.  I'm sure that tschak would do the same.  But atm I don't think any of the devs are using MythTV, so it will fall to those that are using it to work to improve that experience.

J.

[B34N]

I will work with anyone that wishes to help improve the MythTV experience in LMCE to integrate their work.  I'm sure that tschak would do the same.  But atm I don't think any of the devs are using MythTV, so it will fall to those that are using it to work to improve that experience.

I can try to help test. If any devs can make use of a tuner card, I have one or two spare ones that I'll donate. I need cable card for my provider.

[B34N]

Has there been any more thought to improving MythTV functionality in LMCE? Recording and playing back content is a primary need for me. I could just go back to a dedicated MythTV system and ditch LMCE, but I really, really don't want to do that. LMCE is much more complete of a solution and the group of supporters is super friendly. I'm not a developer but will help out in any way that I can. Most of the challenges that I'm facing now a pretty simple and might really be user error. For example:

• There doesn't seem to be an option to sort by show by air date (kind of a big deal if you want to watch recordings in order)
• Deleting recordings doesn't seem to work 100% (I chose delete but they still show in my orbiters)
• Thumbnails are not showing with recorded videos (Might be an issue related just to me)
• Live TV option isn't well integrated (or anything playing through the MythTV interface for that matter)

Thanks,
B34N

[tschak909]

So much work needs to be done to make MythTV work better in LMCE, in my opinion, a whole new Myth Player based on embedding the recently refactored libmyth from 0.25 forward would be the best choice, but it will take a considerable amount of engineering to make it work well.

Unfortunately, this isn't very high on my priority list, because MythTV just doesn't work very well anymore even by itself. The greedy, meiopic, pieces of shit who run the broadcast/cable/satellite TV industries have made it a living hell to bolt on your own PVR to their feeds. I can't use MythTV realistically at all for anything except for Antenna feeds. And just about everybody else in the US is in this boat. This pretty much kills it for me.

-Thom

[B34N]

The greedy, meiopic, pieces of shit who run the broadcast/cable/satellite TV industries have made it a living hell to bolt on your own PVR to their feeds.

I can't agree more with the above. Fortunately, ever since you brought .25 into the mix, I can use my HDHR prime with cable card to record OTA channels.

What about the other bullets? Am I missing something that already exists that makes it easy to watch recordings (however they are obtained: MythTV, torrents, usenet) in chronological order and be able to delete watched ones from the orbiter with little effort? Right now I see all everything alphabetically.

B34N

[tschak909]

I need to do a _LOT_ of engineering work on the media browser.

A _lot_.

Due to the way the code is structured, the changes that I need to make, are difficult to wrap in my own head (I can't speak for anyone else), and require changes to _both_ Orbiter and the Media Plugin to work properly. It will be gruesome, and I will probably need to make a separate branch to do the work, as I will need a significant chunk of free time to do this.

I plan to make the following changes to the media browser:

* Collapse items with the same title. This will essentially allow items with the same title (e.g. Grey's Anatomy or Babylon 5), to be shown as a single item, that can be drilled down into. Showing sub views as needed (Season, Episode, falling to title with episode name if none of these other attributes are present). This is _very_ difficult, as it requires me to change the Title view (which in reality uses a variant of the Filename view logic, with lots of fall through if a title isn't available, etc.), to use the attribute view instead, I will have to fuse many of the little things that are present in the title view (files without titles, etc.), into the Attribute view, and not let things fall through the cracks. I've attempted this before, and realized that it will take hundreds of hours of debugging, because of the state permutations (the code is shared between media types, etc.). Shit will be weird for a while.

* Add recently Added sort type. (This will take some additions to UpdateMedia, as we don't currently record a creation timestamp in the File table).

* Tapping Recordings should show a media grid of TV recordings from mythTV in the orbiter, not using MythTV's UI.

There is more, but I am tired, and I still have many hours of contract work to do tonight. I'll dump more as I think of it.

-Thom

[B34N]

I plan to make the following changes to the media browser:

I love all the changes that you plan. Can I just donate my sleeping hours to you so that you have the time to get them done?

[tschak909]

Do you remember the conversation we had many months ago, how you could help best, given what you do on a daily basis?

Find a money source so that I can work on LinuxMCE every day for the rest of my life. That's how you can help.

-Thom

[dopey]

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

I'm familiar with the DCE router and how it works. I spent many hours (and a lot of money) on LinuxMCE back when it was first starting out, and got a good amount of experience in that. I would have needed to study up on the plugins though. I'm also fairly familiar with mythfrontend, namely with theming and remote control. When I was still considering this project I was thinking that the majority of the work would be in the theme.

This certainly would have been a large project and taken the majority of time for a while, but I was ready for it... wouldn't be the first nor the last large dev project I took on.

BUT, after getting that initial response, I started remembering why I left the LinuxMCE community years ago. I then did a search to get up to speed with the recent events of LinuxMCE... and found Hari even started his own system, because he got so fed up. That put the final nail in the coffin for me. I haven't even thought to rechecked this post until now... just because I can't sleep and got curious.

LinuxMCE is a wonderful concept, but led by some close minded and rude developers. That just makes for an environment that I don't particularly want to work in... especially for free. I'm not aiming that at you, Thom; you've done a lot for LinuxMCE, and it's users, when I was around; and likely have continued to do so.

Of course, like Hari, I still need a Smart Home Automation system. If anyone's interested, I'm currently donating my dev time to Pytomation. But there are a lot of home automation systems out there. I'm still considering Home Genie (looks like some Pluto devs made that), but I like how easy Pytomation made it to create new interfaces and devices, and add custom code.

[Esperanto]

Thank you so much for sharing your feelings.

There is certainly a lot of rudeness floating around. It might even be useful to put something that measures the rudeness and helpfulness of users clearly visible on the forum. Maybe the attitude is the consequence of LinuxMCE being such a beast and having not developers to get it quickly enough to were we all envision it. The people who do put their time and effort in have such a dedication that whatever time others spend is always a fraction of theirs. Even though I totally agree that being nice will get us much further, please try to see it from their side also. (Thinking of how many good devs we might have lost because of rudeness makes me wanna cry....). We can only hope one day the rude also see that its much better to have as many aboard as possible even if they think a bit differently or spend less time. Everybody has their own path and we can use any contribution however big or small.

I hope you can reconsider and think of all the love that must be here to actually get something big as LinuxMCE into being... not everybody around is rude and even the rude must have some good sides ;-)