Streaming with MythTV

Purpose
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 (LCD?) screen then they will also be streamed over your (wifi) network to the Nokia Internet Tablet (770/N800/N810) device at 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)

Requiresments
First notice that this has only been tested on the N810 but it really just requires mplayer on the tablet so it should work on the N800 for sure and possibly on the 770 though I never had one so I don't know.

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)

I recommend to get MythBuntu if you haven't already, it's a great dist and is organized quite well.

The Tablet (770,N800,N810)
1. mplayer installed

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:

[code]


 * 1) !/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

[/code]

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! :-)

Contact
Liran Tal 