[mythtv-users] MythWeb + myth-remote-control

[f-myth-users@media.mit.edu]

I've been thinking a bit recently about a feature I mentioned a couple
months ago, and it seems more implementable now.  (Is MythWeb covered
by the current feature freeze? :)

The idea is to be able to browse recordings in MythWeb, but, if you
clicked on the image in any given row, to have the frontend play it
instead of having it streamed to the browser.  This is handy in
situations where you don't necessarily have a pre-established
playlist, and would like to start the next recording on the fly while
the previous one is still playing.  (Useful for VJ'ing, for meetings
in which you're presenting a bunch of short clips, for those of us who
find a browser on a close-up high-res screen much more readable than
the TV on the other side of the room, etc etc.)  Obviously, this would
be optional, so the existing behavior of streaming directly to the
browser still works for those who want it.

Originally, it looked like the way to do this was to send a different
URL to the browser such that the image link ran a cgi script that then
talked to the frontend (which might not be the same as the backend
machine), and which then ran mplayer right on top of the frontend GUI.
This is inelegant in a number of ways, though.

But with the recent work that went into SVN (courtesy of the bounty
that was paid for the added functionality) for remote-controlling the
frontend from elsewhere, this could be a lot easier:  Each of the rows
in MythWeb's recorded-programs page has a URL that runs a cgi script
that gets handed some ID for the program (whatever's easiest to put in
the URL and look up in the DB later), and the cgi script then commands
the frontend to play that recording directly, just as if the user
navigated there via the frontend's UI.  Seems very simple.

The clean way to implement this would be to augment MythWeb to run an
arbitrary script (e.g., the cgi script gets configured to call one of
potentially several scripts, and hands it the program ID), and the
first (but maybe not only) script to actually get written would be the
one that takes the program ID and tells the frontend remote-control to
play it.

MythWeb would need two additional configuration options somewhere:
o Whether to enable this behavior at all
o Which frontend to use, if there is more than one

How feasible does this sound?