Streaming with MythTV

The purpose of this small how-to is to guide you on setting up MythTV video player so that when you play videos with MythTV and watch them on your screen then they will also be streamed over your (wifi) network to your tablet the same time.

Obviously, this would mean that for every movie which you will play in MythTV the box will stream it to your network. Last time I checked my router didn't charge me for putting some more load on the network so... I don't suppose you're watching movies 24/7, and even then, who cares, let the router handle it. Any MyhTV box should handle it with ease (specifically if it does tv capture card stuff)

Contents

[edit] Requirements

A tablet running OS2008 with mplayer is recommended, but it may work with the 770.

[edit] MythTV box

  1. Any MythTV version should do.
  2. MythTV is connected to your LAN (the same LAN which the tablet will be connected to via WiFi)
  3. VLC software installed (apt-get install vlc on Debian/Ubuntu based distributions)

[edit] Tablet

mplayer installed.

[edit] Instructions

  1. Run MythTV
  2. Go to Utilities/Setup -> Setup -> Media Settings -> Video Settings -> Player Settings#
  3. Change the default player option from either "Internal" or the mplayer command "mplayer -fs -zoom -quiet %s" to the following:
    /usr/bin/streamplayer
  4. Create the file /usr/bin/streamplayer
  5. Insert the following code to it: 
    #!/bin/bash
vlc "$1" --intf dummy --sout '#transcode{fps=25.0,height=320,width=240,vcodec=mp4v,vb=768,acodec=mpga,ab=128,channels=2}:standard{access=http,mux=asf,dst=:8080}' &
mypid=$!
mplayer -fs -zoom -quiet "$1"
kill -9 $mypid
  6. Make the file executable:
    chmod +x /usr/bin/streamplayer
  7. That's all! Now play a movie in MythTV, go to your tablet and fire up mplayer with the following arguments from console:
    mplayer -aspect 16:9 http://ip-of-your-mythtv-server-:8080
  8. Watch the movie and enjoy! :-)
Retrieved from "http://wiki.maemo.org/Streaming_with_MythTV"