#mythtv

Acaba de ser anunciado o lançamento da nova versão do aplicativo de media center MythTV 31. Ele permite converter um PC de mesa em uma televisão, videocassete, centro de música, álbum de fotos, uma estação de gravação e assistir DVD.

A arquitetura do MythTV é baseada na separação do back-end para armazenar ou capturar vídeo (IPTV, placas DVB etc.) e o front-end para exibir e formar a interface. O

Being in the cable business, we are at Techpart decided it would be helpful for our customers and their friends alike if we created an infographic centred around the different type of cables commonly used by you at home, at work and throughout your daily life.

Cables come in many different shapes and sizes, each with their own specific job and method of information transfer. We know it can often…

Having only used MythTV to play recorded content or occasionally with MythVideo to play videos obtained by other means (get-iplayer, DVD rips, etc), I'd not tried playing optical discs at all. So imagine my surprise when I tried and nothing happened at all. No log messages printed by the mythfrontend process (at least with the default logging settings), no pop-up saying "I couldn't find a disc" or anything like that, just nothing.

So I took a peek and found two things were needed:

- Ensure the /dev/dvd link points to appropriate place (e.g. /dev/sr0) - Ensure that libdvdcss2 is installed so that encrypted DVDs will play: apt-get install libdvdcss2 on Debian with the debian-multimedia repo (see http://debian-multimedia.org) will sort this out for you.

There have been a number of changes to MythTV and supporting tools, and I’ve had to make a few fixes to the mythcommflag-wrapper.sh script, adapted from the version on the mythtv wiki to get this working for me again.

Changes required to get this working again included:

using “avconv” instead of “ffmpeg”, as I had problems with the new version of ffmpeg in the debian-multimedia repository, and ffmpeg has been deprecated in the official Debian repos in preference of avconv

using “mythutil” instead of “mythcommflag” to perform some skiplist and cutlist operations, as this has changed in 0.25

Some minor improvements made are:

using “mythutil” instead of direct mysql commands to update the skiplist, avoiding the need to transform the cutlist frame numbers into SQL commands

improving the safe channel list to be in a bash array rather than a very large A or B or C… style conditional

There are still a few bits and bobs of tidying to do, as there are direct uses of mysql for things which seem unlikely to be necessary, and if mythutil or other supported commands can be used instead then this will make the script overall more robust.

Silence detection using the mythcommflag-wrapper.sh script fails for Freeview HD streams, as the streams contain AAC audio rather than MP3 audio, and so the `mp3splt' command doesn't work on the dumped sound files.

To work around this, simply change the "avconv -acodec copy" command in the script to use "avconv -acodec mp2", to convert the aac audio into mp2 format, which mp3splt *can* cope with (avconv can't encode mp3 files, only decode them, so we use mp2 instead).

This is a bit slower but at least works until there's an aac equivalent of mp3splt.

After a fair amount of pain trying to find ways of getting copy-protected DVDs to play under MythTV:

Seeing if MythTV can play these DVDs directly from the disc (no)

Trying to find Linux tools which can rip the DVDs (none)

Running various windows DVD-ripping tools under WINE (just gives disc read errors and fails)

Running various windows DVD-ripping tools in a VirtualBox VM (just gives disc read errors and fails)

Realising that one of the DVD drives I was trying this on is still region-locked (Linux kernel messages like “Add. Sense: Read of scrambled sector without authentication”)

etc

..I’ve made the sad realisation that I’m just going to have to keep a Windows machine around to be able to use something like DVDFab HD Decrypter to rip to an iso or AUDIO_TS/VIDEO_TS directory structure, which MythVideo can then play fine (either locally on the frontend, perhaps via a USB stick, or via a network filesystem mount like NFS or samba).