MythVodka

Outdated: The BBC iPlayer MythStreams plug-in has been discontinued. Updated: Oh no it hasnt! Ive just been busy. And its now called Myth Video On Demand Ka! Or MythVodka.

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MythVodka is a plugin that plays streaming content full screen using the internal player. It supports BBC iPlayer, NZBs and streaming content like Diggnation from anywhere (but I only use it for Revision 3 stuff).

This plugin is based heavily on the Movie Times plugin, which was an awesome starting point. It will become less based on this as development continues. So hats off to movie times strreaming dev guy, and apologies from ripping off your code and messing it all up.

All content is downloaded it whatever ungodly format those crazy internet TV providers care to use, then transcoded into an mpeg2 (using either mencoder of ffmpeg) which mythtv plays. Its wasteful on resources and adds an extra dependancy, but is reliable. If anyone wants to help out and get the internal player to play the streaming h264 files, then be my guest!

A video of an early version of the plugin at work is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7eVgPMTa0g

Im not going to get into the naughty ness of NZB streaming here, just will mention that you need to get nzbperl.pl, unrar and ffmpeg all working. Have a look at the included scripts.

For less naughtyness of watching iPlayer or Diggnation then read on!

Prerequisites: Mencoder (part of mplayer) Curl (in most distros) QMake MythTV Source (or so it seems)

To install:

cd into your mythplugins source dir then...

wget http://www.bewhere.co.uk/mythvodka.04.tar.gz
tar xzf mythvodka.04.tar.gz
cd mythvodka
rm Makefile (might not be there, dont worry if not)
qmake mythvodka.pro
make
make install
cp scripts/* /usr/local/bin/
wget http://www.linuxcentre.net/get_iplayer/get_iplayer
mv get_iplayer /usr/local/bin

Check your path on mencoder, mine is in /usr/bin/mencoder

Note: You may not have qmake installed. This is the QT make utility. It often comes in the qt-devel or qt4-devel package on various distributions. Install this if you're missing qmake... You may need to explicitly call qmake with its full path (on Fedora 8 this is: /usr/lib/qt4/bin/qmake)

Next you have to add the menu entries for the plugin:

cd /usr/local/share/mythtv vi library.xml

Add the following lines:

   <button>
     <type>STREAM</type>
     <text>Myth Vodka</text>
     <action>PLUGIN mythvodka</action>
     <depends>mythvodka</depends>
   </button>

vi media_settings.xml

Add the following lines:

   <button>
     <type>SETTINGS_MYTHVODKA</type>
     <text>MythVodka Setting</text>
     <action>CONFIGPLUGIN mythvodka</action>
     <depends>mythvodka</depends>
   </button>

Out of the box at the very least it should be able to play Revision 3 content like diggnation, and if your in the UK then hopefully with those inctructions iPlayer will work as well.

All creadit for being smart and getting the iPlayer files goes to www.linuxcentre.net - they do the hard work, I just wrap it up into a plugin. All credit for everything else goes to me.