[mythtv] Channel management

[Simon Kenyon]

ramon.roca at xcombo.com wrote:

>About the player for the preview, new mythchannels have a setting that
>points to which player have to be used. Defaults to mythtv, which
>certainly makes sense, but hasn't been implemented yet, it can't since
>it's still unstable for some features, so no preview available now. To w/a
>this,
>it can be set to any external player and have also settings to describe
>the system command to be executed, just like mythvideo, or the external
>change channel call. I do find it useful to me and allows me to work on
>that so what does not makes sense is take this out. By default I can
>provide a readme explaining how to setup this preview with mplayer and
>dvbstream (which is what I'm using now), but then everybody can also call
>whatever player of choice.
>
>I'm doing in that way certainly for being able to be included in the CVS.
>But I don't know, those kind of discussions sometimes looks more something
>like "what has to be first, the egg or the hen?"
>
here in ireland (dublin) the local cable company has chosen to use 
non-std frequencies.
they are down in the VHF band. being able to manually set these up is 
there quite important to me.
the way i did it to use mythtv was to work out the channels with another 
app (which came with the ivtv driver)
and put them in by hand with filldatabase --manual. although it works, 
it is not exactly easy. now i know, you get
what you pay for. i'm not being ungrateful.

mythchannels seemed to be caught in a argument about the "purity" of the 
code and a desire to not have a dependency
on mplayer for the preview. i can understand that as long as there is an 
alternative. is it possible for the built-in viewer to
work in a real-time mode, so that the effects of tuning are immediately 
visible?

it is just my plain ignorance that i don't know the answer to this. 
there is a lot of code and i've only just started to
understand what is going on.

keep up the code work (all of you)
it is appreciated
--
simon