MythTV

MythTV is a Linux application which turns a computer with the necessary hardware into a personal video recorder, a digital multimedia home entertainment system, or Home Theater Personal Computer. It is used by LinuxMCE to handle viewing and recording of television.

• MythTV Main Website

Programmer's Guide

We have created a DCE Device that wraps the MythTV libraries and can receive commands from other DCE devices and use them to control the TV functionality of the mythtv. Supported functionality at this moment comprises the following: Start TV, Stop TV, Tune to channel, Channel Up, Channel Down. The player uses the same mechanisms that the current (as of 0.16 version) MythTv frontend program uses. So for every mythtv installation that currently works the player should work the same way as the current frontend.

In order to be able to do this we had to change the signature of some methods in a class used by the mythfrontend application. The classes in question is the TV class defined in the libs/libmythtv/tv_play.{h,cpp} files from the mythtv repository. The changes consist in some method and field access changes (made some previously private methods to be public). This was done in order to be able to control the player programatically and avoid putting synthetic events into the playback windows event queue. The changes only affect the headers and are used to compile the player. The binary should run on any machine with a working 0.16 MythTV installation.

Since we needed to have a resizable playback window we had to make some changes in the way the mythtv playback window is created and displayed. The change is a derived class from the MainMythWindow class which knows about resize events and uses them to resize all child objects inside it. The class is available in the plutohome.com svn repository also (in the MythTV Player module).

This module does not work currently with a mythfrontend application running. The module will present itself to the server as another mythfrontend client and it will use one tuner on playback (the same way as a mythtfronted will do).