Talk:MythTV on Mac OS X
Contents
Major Revisions to Page, Nov 2009
I just completed a set of major revisions to this page. I moved the handbuilding section to a new page (auto-build section remains), added sections on startup and monitoring, cleaned up a bunch of errors, and organized the page better. I also deleted some of the old comments on this Talk page, for example requests for explanations that I have now provided. Brianboonstra 15:35, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
Daily Builds
> If there is a problem with one of the builds, please let me know from my home page. http://www.thesniderpad.com. My email address is dsnider (at) thesniderpad.com. I added a contact section for registered users so that it is more accessible in the future.
- I needed a nightly build a couple of days ago, and noticed at there hadn't been any built at thesniderpad for a few weeks... and so to fulfill my need, I built my own, and in the process decided heck to just automate it and make them available as another source if people needed them.
http://www.macvana.com/mythtv/
I didn't want to edit the main article without permission so I'm just announcing it here for now. If you need to ask reach me, you can at grant@kwok.ca
Merge Various Mac pages
We should really merge the various pages together: Myth_on_Mac_x86
Maybe - but maybe not. For people using the current revisions of Myth, there's pretty much no need for the other page, everything just works. But, for people building older versions for use with their older backend, it's nice to have that information available. Maybe leaving the other page as historical information (with notes making that clear) would be ok.
Apple Remote
Is the behavior of the Apple Remote documented anywhere? I have been unable to find it. ( I later found it on the trac ticket adding apple remote support: http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/2017 )
I just stumbled upon the Pause/Play behavior (hold down the Play/Pause button causes a play/pause event. Tapping that button marks your present spot). A list of the actions on tap/hold for each button in the various MythTV modes would be very useful. Also, being able to customize the behavior would be great (e.g. I would much rather have Play/Pause as the tap event).
You can customize the Apple Remote (as well as numerous others) for the OSX frontend using Remote Buddy[1] Now, if only someone could figure out how to raise the priority of Remote Buddy during MythFrontend playback so you don't have to press a key twice to make something happen...
Keybindings can be altered in the settings menu using mythweb. Try changing the "Pause" setting for TV Playback from P to P,Enter to support the play/pause button on the apple remote.
Slimming down MythFrontend.app
The osx-packager.pl script provides a nicely packaged version of MythFrontend, which is used by several people to provide a downloadable version. One problem with this is the frontend binaries are pretty huge, weighing in at 100MB+. gzip/bzip2 can help this, but only so much. Slimming it down might help to make it more accessible to new users, and could help things like using it on AppleTV.
What do others think about making the default build a bit slimmer, and having something like "--build-all" available for a complete version. Or, go the opposite way and have a "--minimal" build option. Or, if not that, then at least including some instructions here for creating a smaller version.
Some areas for possible savings:
MythPlugins. Some infrequently used plugins can take a lot of space. libmythflix.dylib is about 5MB, libmythnews.dylib is 3.8MB. MythArchive is also a big space contributor, but it's not listed among the plugins to choose/leave. (I don't know if the "-plugins" options are honored in the script. I selected only "mythdvd,mythweather,mythvideo" but, several others were built (mythflix, mythnews, etc.)
Themes. These take a lot of space, and currently it's an all or nothing option ( -themeskip ). Being able to specify certain themes, like you can do for plugins, could help this.
i18n. All the languages add up to a decent amount of disk space. But, for a pre-built version it's tough to pare out languages. May be more relevant as an option to someone building a binary for their own use.
Other packages/libraries? Qt takes up a lot of space, but I don't know if anything can be left out of that package.
I just did a build of 0.20-fixes, without themes or plugins as a test. The build command was: "osx-packager.pl -svnbranch release-0-20-fixes -pluginskip -themeskip", and the resulting MythFrontend.app weighed in at 50MB. Still not exactly light.. but less than half that of the full version. A bzip2'd tar file of that app compressed to 17MB.
1080p Playback?
There have been several reports of playback problems at very high display resolutions like 1080p. Maybe a warning about this, or at least some definitive information, would be useful. I only use 720p, and that works great.. Anyone else have info on 1080p playback?
(tji) I recently did some testing on this issue, after getting access to a new iMac with 1920x1200 resolution. I did see the problem on 1080i video. It's related to the scaling of 1080i content, where QuickTime seems to use software processing rather than the normal hardware scaling. More info here: http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/294605
(MikePalmer) Why does the latest 0.21-fixes packages from "The Sniderpad.com" and "macvana.com" have very choppy 1080p playback on a 2ghz Core 2 Duo MacBook and 2ghz Core 2 Dueo iMac with 10.5 but vanvalkinburgh's package works fine on both of them?
http://vanvalkinburgh.org/files/osx/mythtv/release-0-21-fixes/MythFrontend-17238.zip
Should this be listed while the others are not? Is macvana or Sniderpad both building with libraries from old versions of OS X or is vanvalkinburg applying special patches? Something is different.
