[mythtv-users] Playing youtube & video.google.com on frontend

Kevin Kuphal kuphal at dls.net
Thu Jan 18 01:59:53 UTC 2007


Ross Campbell wrote:
> On 1/17/07, Monkey Pet <monkeypet at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> Is there a project to make it easy to play youtube and video.google.com
>> content on the mythfrontend?
>>     
>
> Well, sort of...
>
> In recent svn, there was an update to mythnews that added the ability
> to handle other media types using the internal player, and with it, I
> can browse and launch a few youtube rss feeds. The problems I have
> with this are:
>   
FYI, you can add your own RSS feeds that include enclosures (like 
YouTube and GV) if you have more you wish to see.
> 1) the entire file currently gets downloaded to the local system
> *BEFORE* any attempt to play it is made. This makes playing streaming
> content a fair bit more painful when you have to wait for it --
> especially given that you may find the file you waited 30 seconds to
> download is utter garbage.
>   
I worked on adding this feature and originally I tried working with 
spawning mplayer for the playback but there were enough issues with 
timeouts and inconsistent results that it didn't seem much worse off 
than using the Internal player (see below).
> 2) The internal player doesn't handle every downloaded file properly.
> On my system and in my experience, it's about 50/50 for youtube
> downloads - 50% of the time, it makes mythfrontend coredump. (while
> mplayer plays the downloaded files no problem) YMMV.
>   
Any chance you could compile your system in debug mode so that you can 
capture a backtrace and post a ticket in TRAC with that information?  I 
may not be able to look at it right away but at least the problem would 
be identified/reported.
> Oh, and it would be possible and probably a better overall user
> experience to write a plugin to mythstream to handle youtube, google
> video, videosift, etc. browsing and *STREAMING* using mplayer. Anyone
> willing to write a perl parser script for those could pretty much get
> that going quickly.
>   
The best option is to get the Internal player to handle streaming 
content from other sources than Myth.  It obviously can play the 
downloaded file so the only addition is to incorporate streaming code.   
While non-trivial, this would give us the ability to do this from within 
Myth and not rely on external programs any more than we have to. 



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