Difference between revisions of "AmazonVideo"

Revision as of 17:46, 8 May 2012

Setting up your MythTV system to watch Amazon Instant Video requires some extensive customization. This topic documents one way to achieve it. This setup will also allow convenient viewing of other Internet content, such as Comedy Central shows.

Alternatives

The MythNetvision grabbers are able to display lots of different content from the Internet. For example, see Comedycentral.py. However, there is currently no grabber for Amazon Instant Video. (A promising email thread on the subject exists, but it has trailed off). Also even for content like on Comedy Central, the entire episode is not available, so the grabber is a less desireable option.

The Firefox topic describes several Firefox customizations that make any Internet pages accessible. The instructions on this page follow a similar strategy. The advantage to using this page is that some of the steps have been automated.

Features

• Mouse acceleration
• Menu updates
• Icons for the Terra theme
• Disabling of display power management during use (DPMS)

Prerequisites

You should install MythTV from source before you follow these instructions. While it would be possible to perform surgery on a binary installation, these instructions assume that you can checkout the Git sources.

Other packages that should be installed are:

• lirc
• Firefox, (and see Firefox#Firefox_configuration for some optional configuration options)
• Full Fullscreen Firefox add-on, (optional)
• xdotool, (on many systems: sudo apt-get install xdotool)
• pylirc, (on many systems: sudo apt-get install python-pylirc)
• mythnetvision, (while not strictly required for this feature, having it installed made these instructions more convenient)

Installation

The patches are available on GitHub: https://github.com/chadparry/mythtv/tree/firefox.

Customization

The menu options can be customized in /usr/local/share/mythtv/netvisionmenu.xml, (although if you have changed the default paths for your installation, the location will be different).

The following snippet from netvisionmenu.xml shows the Amazon Instant Video option.

    <button>
        <type>AMAZON_VIDEO</type>
        <text>Amazon Instant Video</text>
        <description>Amazon.com: Your Video Library </description>
        <action>EXEC lircfirefox.py 'https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/library'</action>
    </button>

You can add new menu options for different web pages. Just copy those lines and change the descriptions to whatever you want. The action line should start with EXEC lircfirefox.py and then include the URL for your desired page.