[mythtv] New Protocol Development

Glenn subscribe at clubpoint.net
Tue Sep 23 03:12:17 UTC 2008


I've recently been looking into development of apps interfacing with the
backend, and found a quite incomplete protocol spec/docs, and also came
across the dev note that a new protocol may be required.

Rather than simply diving in, developing a new protocol and saying "here
it is", I'd like to put some ideas together, develop a spec, and then get
feedback and so on prior to simply slapping something together. So please,
share your ideas.

So far, from my searching of the archives, I found a few mentions of a new
protocol, but no real work towards it. A few things I found (please note
that I'm really quite new to mythtv):

- Upnp has been worked on, but is simply too 'heavy' to be used as the
primary protocol, so will likely remain as an 'extra' protocol
- XML-based protocols or similar are likely to also be too 'heavy', and
parsing will therefore be too CPU intensive for low power systems and so
on. New protocol must be easy on the processor!
- MythXML has been worked on somewhat and provides things like Program
Guide data

So in summary, there are currently three protocols, none of which provide
all services, which I'd like to change. Other observations I've made:

- The MythTV protocol isn't clearly defined/documented anywhere (the wiki
contains partial specs through reverse engineering)
- The protocol doesn't use any authentication
- The protocol does not have the capacity to deal with protocol version
changes and feature changes without occasionally (often?) breaking
compatibility with older versions.



More information about the mythtv-dev mailing list