[mythtv-users] XBMC questions

[Bruce Nordstrand]

On 16/10/09 2:08 PM, "Phill Edwards" <philledwards at gmail.com> wrote:

> Funny the things you pick up from reading these posts. I'm not even a
> Ubuntu guy (I'm on CentOS and use Axel's excellent RPM repos) but I
> read a post called "Import Announcement for people using my Ubuntu
> repository" post because it mentioned 0.22 - and hey presto I learn
> that quite a few folks seem to be using XBMC as a frontend. I couldn't
> get this up and running on my machine so haven't had a chance to try
> it out. One of the posts said "We have all our movies, TV shows and
> music on XBMC and use MythFrontend for TV only. I will look into XBMC
> universal so hopefully I can use XBMC for everything including
> TV/recording watching and relegate Myth to backend services only".
> 
> Does that mean that quite of a few of you are using the XBMC frontend
> for almost everything?
> What's your feedback?
> And does it all work with a remote control?
> And does anyone have it working on CentOS 5.x?

Phill

That was me :) I have 2 boxes - a headless Myth backend and a combined XBMC
& Myth frontend. I am currently on Myth 0.21-fixes. We decided to use XBMC
because of the great UI, especially in Movies/TV Shows and Music. Movies &
TV shows will download season info, fanart, actor info etc while music will
download album info. I use an MS mouse which works out of the box in XBMC,
no configuration needed if installing from .debs. You can install from
source as well but I think the time I did that the remote still worked out
of the box. XMB will update it's Movie/Music library everytime your start
the app to bring things up to date. At this stage I haven't found anything
it won't play, it will even play videos inside zip files by unzipping them
first! I found that out when I played Buffy one day forgetting that it was
zipped up :)

There is the ability to play Myth recordings etc out of the box using their
myth:// protocol but I have never been able to get that to work to my
satisfaction. That's why I have a Myth frontend onboard to watch my
recordings. I flick between the two by pressing the Live TV button on my
remote. I do not use Live TV.

I am very happy with XBMC but would rather have one package do everything.
As Myth is my TV system I would prefer it to be that but if something comes
along that allows me to play Myth successfully and as Myth does in XBMC, I
will be one of the first to jump at it....

Cheers
Bruce