MythTV App for Boxee

**clmbngbkng** · August 3rd, 2010, 08:31 PM

Great to hear!

**smeranda** · August 3rd, 2010, 09:31 PM

Awesome work ekristen, it's looking great and I'm excited for your new releases.

BTW, I know you went a different direction, but did you ever find a way to play local files through the app (as opposed to over the net)?

**ekristen** · August 4th, 2010, 07:44 AM

Originally Posted by smeranda

BTW, I know you went a different direction, but did you ever find a way to play local files through the app (as opposed to over the net)?

I am assuming you are referring to having Boxee installed on your mythtv backend thus the recordings are local? Am I correct?

**smeranda** · August 4th, 2010, 08:12 AM

Originally Posted by ekristen

I am assuming you are referring to having Boxee installed on your mythtv backend thus the recordings are local? Am I correct?

My question is in reference to this thread:
http://forums.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=19207

**clmbngbkng** · August 8th, 2010, 04:49 AM

I know you only recently told us about the progress you've been making on the app but any update?

**ekristen** · August 9th, 2010, 01:25 PM

Afternoon everyone ... here is an update for you.

I have hit a brick wall.

Unfortunately the API to the Boxee Player is in my opinion extremely limited at this time. There is only one way you can play media and that is by first setting up a ListItem and setting its path. The only data the SetPath method will take is in the form of a local file, http url, flash://, or mms://.

The reason this is a brick wall is that the best method for watching recordings natively from a MythTV backend is to stream them using the MythProtocol that works over port 6543 (the default for the backend during installation). This unfortunately is not in any of the formats that SetPath will accept.

One of the MythTV devs wrote some native python bindings for MythTV that I have been able to get working inside of Boxee. These bindings allow access to the recordings via a file object just as if you were accessing a file on the local system, but as I already mentioned only a path to a local file, not a file object or file handler, is an acceptable argument for the SetPath method.

Until the wonderful people open up Boxee's api on the player or adjust it to accept other inputs my hands are tied. However there are a few options available to us.

Most default installations of MythTV come with MythWeb installed. Streaming the recordings in my initial testing have proven to be successful by means of skipping forward and reverse. However using the MythWeb interface will require some manual configuration on the user's part as MythBoxee will have to be told where MythWeb is located. The other option (and the default one) will be to continue to pull the recording from the XML interface.

So where does this leave us? Actually not in a bad spot. Thankfully I have been able to get my development version of MythBoxee to use the MythTV Python Bindings and connect and transfer recording metadata via MySQL. With some tweaks to the python bindings I believe I will be able to grab the watched field from the database which will allow filtering in MythBoxee to show watched or unwatched recordings only. Also I am hoping to capitalize on what looks to be callback functionality in the player so that I can track watch progress and mark recordings as watched in the database. Finally I should be able to pull videos from the database and make them available and eventually recording schedules and TV guides, etc ...

This is going to take time, mainly because I am doing this by myself. My main goal for now is reliable playback of recordings and being able to track what you have and haven't watched. Everything after that is secondary.

In a somewhat unrelated note, I should have my website updated and running under with a CMS and have the MythBoxee project page themed out with screenshots and a status section there in the next couple of weeks. Once that is up, I will probably stop posting updates here, as they will be on my site.

Thats all for now, sorry for the really long post.

Enjoy your week.

-Erik

**clmbngbkng** · August 16th, 2010, 06:21 PM

Thanks for the update post and it is really too bad that things are limited by boxee as of now.

Do you know of any way we can politely suggest to them to open up the API more? This is just so we can replace the mythprotocol they already removed.

And by streaming the recordings through mythweb would it still stream the original video as is or would it have to encode on the fly? I ask because my mythbox is an old P4 processor and, well, it's pretty weak for video.

Also do you have any suggestions on how to delete and reset the app? For some reason the 3.23 version just upped and stopped working. I then tried to remove the app in boxee and the 3.23.1 version and nothing seems to show up. I do know that it queries the mythbox since it spins the HD to get info. Any thoughts?

**ekristen** · August 16th, 2010, 06:49 PM

Best thing we can do is put in a feature request in their ticketing system.

No transcoding takes place Boxee doesn't do that it is just a frontend.

I have a couple of ideas to make streaming better, detecting if boxee is installed locally and open the recordings as local files. If boxee is remote to the backend play files locally if smb has been setup on the backend. These options would provide a better experience and give better control to skip and buffer.

As for your issues send me your boxes log via email and after you remove the app go into the apps folder and delete the folder com.erikkristensen.mythboxee.

Erik

**ekristen** · August 18th, 2010, 05:08 PM

Good Evening,

I have good news to share with you all.

I have been conducting some tests and while I have only been able to test only one method so far I have had success! I have had success in playing back media from a samba share without having to add the share into the Boxee sources section. The only downside is that you have to configure a samba share on the mythtv backend, which is a small price to pay in my opinion. No word yet on local playback ... I am still working that.

Are there any other types of shares that you would like testing? I can only really think of NFS but depending on who you talk to might not be a good option for video playback.

By the way with the samba share for video playback I have been able to successfully skip forward and reverse.

-Erik

**swackhap** · August 19th, 2010, 11:12 AM

Erik,

Thanks for sharing all this great work! I just found this thread and read through it, but it appears your repo (http://erikkristensen.com/boxee/) gives me a Page Not Found error. Is the application still available for download? Also, is this limited to a particular OS (like Linux), or will it run on any OS? I'm running Boxee on Windows (don't judge me).

Thanks,
Patrick