Difference between revisions of "MythTV on Mac OSX build"

Revision as of 09:50, 9 November 2010

It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Building_MythTV_on_Mac_OS_X. (Discuss)

Building Automatically

Help Required

This page needs to be updated with instructions on how to build the mythtv backend.

Can you help?

Pre-requisites

In order to run the build you will need the following:

• MythTV packager
• Xcode for your OS X release
• Firewire SDK (optionally)
• pkg-config
• internet connection

Obtaining Xcode and Firewire SKD

Xcode and the Firewire SDK are both available from the apple developer site.

You will need to register as an apple developer.

Select the 'Safari' option as its free :D

Obtaining pkg-config

• Help - is pkg-config actually a requirement? The build complains when its missing but I'm not certain if its actually a requirement.

The easiest way to obtain pkg-config is to first install MacPorts and then use MacPorts to install pkg-config run:

sudo port install pkgconfig

The package script downloads and builds all the dependencies, and if you are lucky gives you several double-clickable applications.

Obtaining the packager

The easiest way to build MythTV from source is to download the packager script. The packager scripts downloads the source and builds the release.

You need to obtain the correct packager for your release.

Stable release (recommended) Either http://svn.mythtv.org/svn/tags/release-0-23.1/packaging/OSX/build/osx-packager.pl

or

Development release http://svn.mythtv.org/svn/trunk/packaging/OSX/build/osx-packager.pl.

e.g:

wget http://svn.mythtv.org/svn/tags/release-0-23.1/packaging/OSX/build/osx-packager.pl

Note: for 10.6.x you need to edit the osx-package.pl file and do a search for 10.6 and follow the instructions.

You can view a complete set of the releases available at MythTV svn

Note: on my macmini the build took about three hours.

Building

Once you have obtained all of the pre-requisites you are ready to build.

Building a release tag (recommended):

./osx-packager.pl -svntag release-0-23-1

Building a branch:

./osx-packager.pl -svnbranch release-0-23-1

Building the trunk (if you are prepared to bleed):

./osx-packager.pl

You should end up with two application MythFrontend.app and MythAVTest.app

Selecting a version to build

The MythTV developers use subversion to manage the source code. There are three main areas (folders) in subversion:

• trunk
• tags
• branches

For developing Myth TV

Trunk is where the latest code is being developed. The trunk is likely to be highly unstable and may not always build. The trunk should is normally only used by developers actively involved in MythTV development.

To use a stable version of Myth TV

Each time the developers create a release of MythTV they create a tag in the 'tags' folder of subversion. The tag represents a 'point in time' version of the source code which doesn't change over time.

If you are looking to build a version of Myth TV for your own use then you will want to build a version from the 'tags' folder.

To get bug fixes for your release which haven't been formally released

Branches

Branches are generally created for two reasons 1) work on a new feature which isn't ready to be merged into the main trunk. 2) creating small fixes to a previous release.

Contribute the build to the community

Now you have a build and as I'm sure your mum always said 'you need to share' ;).

You can help the community by contributing your build to the sourceforge project MythTV for MacOSX which has been set up to host release build of MythTV for the Mac OSX.

You can find details on how to contribute your build on the contributors page.

Building Manually

Sadly, the packager script doesn't always work. Maybe one of the downloadable dependencies has been outdated, and someone needs to try building against a newer one. Maybe the MythTV source code has changed and broken Mac builds. Look on the Myth_on_Mac_-_Build_status page for hints about this. For instructions about building by hand, see Building MythTV on Mac OS X

If you just want to watch TV on your Mac, and you aren't planning to do development, you're better off using a prebuilt binary.