XBMC and MythTV with the MythBox plugin

[Mad-Halfling]

I'm playing with the RaspBMC build http://www.raspbmc.com/ and am experimenting with hooking it up to my MythTV server. I've found that due to licensing and CPU reqs the Pi won't play back the MythTV recordings (I'm in the UK, so they're MPEG2s), but if I substitute a recording file with a different format it will play fine, so I'm looking at transcoding the recordings after I record programmes (I will have to deal with live TV streaming later, but that's not so important to me, at the moment). I was wondering if anyone had already looked at this, and if so what they did and if they had any success?

In the meantime, I'll carry on playing, myself, and post back any progress I make on here.

[robwriter]

Bump!

That's my plan exactly. I don't know if a solution already exists, but I'm gonna take a look and see what I can find.

Will post back any findings.

Rob

[Hairlocks]

I don't have a RPi yet to try out. Have either of you tried the new experimental HLS code in 0.25 it does on demand trancoding, and may even work with live TV. It is not feature complete yet. I think xmbc intends to use it in future.

[robwriter]

I hadn't noticed this before, but I only got 0.25 a few weeks ago with a Ubuntu upgrade.

Got this to work in a browser on the local machine (definitely transcoding based on CPU usage) but I admit I'm not totally clear how it's all working! Doesn't look like the web backend can do live TV but I'll try this on OpenElec tomorrow - at least getting it to transcode recorded video on the fly will be a good start.

[robwriter]

I've got this to work to another PC via the web interface, but can't get it to work to the Pi. All I can see in XBMC is my myth library via uPnP, which I think is what MythTV offers anyway,

I'm guessing it needs an XBMC add-on to work properly.

But mythtvs documentation is pretty much non existent for this feature, so I really have no way of knowing.

Going to give the PS3 Media Server a go - it appears to have documentation, and supports live TV via MythTV.

[robwriter]

As an interim solution I'm using a customised version of the MythBrake script. This is setup as a user job to transcode all recordings to MP4 format when a recording ends. These get dumped in to a folder on the backend server and I can play them from the Pi via a samba share.

This isn't ideal as it doesn't work for live TV and assuming I keep the original recording for playback on other MythTV frontends, it uses twice as much HD space. But given that the long bank holiday weekend is drawing to a close I just wanted a solution!

[moosery]

I Have discovered a workaround with zero effort. If you buy the recently released mpeg2 decoding, then set up upnp to access your myth server, it pretty much just works without any transcoding.
Any stuttering is likely to be network related as this seems to need a lot of bandwidth, ie 100mbit wired.

[Mad-Halfling]

Yup (forgot I was subscribed to this thread, or I'd have added it, myself) I can second the fact that this works fine. Note that I need to check into this further, but when I tried it the MythTV addon froze the system when I tried it, but as the previous poster mentions the MythTV server also includes a uPnP server, so you can add that as a file source and watch your recordings via that.