[mythtvnz] mythtvnz Digest, Vol 21, Issue 1

[David Teirney]

I only get digest mode for emails, so here are some XBMC related responses.

> Doesn't MythBox have scheduling and channel skip already?
>
> http://code.google.com/p/mythbox/

Yes, but it's run as a script so isn't as well integrated into the
XBMC frontend. I don't mind scheduling from another machine, so I
prefer to have the integrated playback using the standard XBMC
dvdplayer. MythBox uses it's own player IIRC and I reckon I've got the
commercial skip behavior working pretty well with my patch (as well as
a patch to choose the AC3 audio stream by default rather than the AAC
stream for TV3 - more details below).

My patch for getting the commercial breaks uses the Myth Protocol API
rather than hitting the MySQL database directly like MythBox does.

> Can XBMC do timestretch? We watch a lot of stuff at 120% of normal speed.
> For me this is one of MythTV's best features.
>
> Cheers,
> Steve

No timestretch functionality at present. I've asked for that as well.

> I just downloaded and installed XBMC (first time I'd heard of it).  I
> got it connected to my myth backend which seems to work alright except
> for the sound.  I see you've ported Paul's patch over to XBMC with the
> above link.  Problem is I went with a SVN build as I wanted to try the
> Mythbox funtionality (actually I upgraded it using the updater).  Is
> there an easy way to tell what version of ffmpeg I've got and whether
> your patch will work (I don't want to wreck it although it wouldn't be
> that hard to fix I suppose)?
>
> Ross

I'm using SVN builds as well. It's the only way I can get things
working with the LATM patch. XBMC has ffmpeg built into the code base
- it's not based on the Linux distro version. In theory you should be
able to apply the LATM patch, configure and compile and have sound
working.

There is also another patch that I've created that chooses the audio
stream with the most number of channels.
http://xbmc.org/trac/ticket/5773. TV3 broadcasts both AAC and AC3.
That patch will automatically choose the surround sound stream on
playback rather than the stero one.

Any problems with either patch, please add a comment to the trac
tickets. I think I've made some other improvements to the LATM patch
to make configure easier, but haven't updated since I didn't think
anyone else was using it. Paul Kendall is trying again to get the LATM
support into the ffmpeg trunk so that will make things much easier to
get LATM support into XBMC and MythTV.

Regards,
David