Choosing a Home Theater Platform
I'd like to setup a HTPC software in my living room, running on this tiny computer ... I had a look at various softwares but i'd prefer one implemented in Python, so that extending would be quite easy.
I'll mainly use it to have tv channel schedule (XML-TV), listen music (ResPyre), and handle video content. The machine won't be able to handle PVR-like usage, but it's not critical since i'm not TV-addicted :-)
So, first off, i looked at the widespread MythTV, and it's really a pain in the ass to setup, then it's easy to understand the success of KnoppMyth (a full blown linux distro including the Myth out of the box). Anyway the main killer feature of MythTV is TV time-shifting, in this particular field it rocks, but i don't need that feature, i'm not inclined to install KnoppMyth, so i forget MythTV.
Next, i had a look at the Python powered Freevo. The website seems dead, Freevo's 1.5 code is a mess, but hey, there's a rewrite taking good shape! In fact Freevo 2 will be a good candidate for me, architectured around Kaa which is an amazing Python multimedia (GUI, EPG, ...) framework using a bunch of good bricks like Evas and Imlib2, allowing full-blown effects in Freevo. Well i tried it, and it looks good, even still in heavy development. The configuration is quite simple, it's my best candidate for now, and guess what ? Plugins seem really a piece of pie to implement :-)
Any other HTPC challenger ? (please no MS Media Center, my box runs linux :)
update: for a more in-deep view of MythTV gaz usine, check http://revision3.com/systm/mythtv/
#. phil on Thu Oct 27 16:07:17 2005
Yeah i found it .. Is there a 0.2 snapshot or public source repository available somewhere ?
Is your HTPC solution easy to extend ?
#. GreyFoxx on Thu Nov 3 17:14:49 2005
umaxx,
What Bugs are you referring to in MythTV? using 0.18 release or SVN? Frontend or Backend?
Not long ago changes were commited to get the frontend and most plugins running under OpenBSD but to date not one OpenBSD user has submitted any bug reports so it makes it hard to fix bugs that noone is made aware of.
I'll run through the source and and make sure that SVN as of today still compiles and runs under OpenBSD.
#. umaxx on Mon Feb 20 14:06:37 2006
@phil: yes its completly modular. but in earlier stage of development. svn repository is available:
svn co https://www.umaxx.net/svn/mediacat/
but completly broken at the moment - because under heavy development...
@GreyFox: last versions of mythtv i tried was 0.10 until 0.15 - these versions i run under gentoo and debian - there were buggy, and often crashs.
maybe there changed a lot since - i'll check out the latest svn and will try to use it under openbsd... if i find some time.
but i think it is not possible to use mythtv as tv-recorder under openbsd because there is no video4linux in openbsd... IMHO mythtv has to much dependecies. why did i need a database in the backend??? why is it written in c++/qt?
#. phil on Mon Feb 20 22:16:11 2006
@umaxx: yes broken, even syntactically at the time i tried it ;-) Anyway i wish you good luck on your effort, i'll keep an eye on MediaCat
#. umaxx on Thu Oct 27 14:51:26 2005
after i having the same problems: mythtv iss tooo buggy. freevo is fucking huge. i want to run it under openbsd.
i decided to write my own application: called mediabox. of course: mdiabox is pure python, but less dependencies as freevo. complete rewrite of bad structured 0.1 is version 0.2 is coming soon...
another hint is pycar... check google.