Hey everyone,

I want to use my MythTV for a video fest at my house.
A friend runs a videofest and he uses Coax cable and additional tuners to transmit the same signal thruout the house to multiple TV's. When a movie ends he puts in the next DVD and starts it. It is a less than elegant solution. Lots of cabling - Lots of signal loss - Not automated. Weather dependent because the cables run outside too.

What I want to do -
1. I would like to use MythTV to build a playlist of videos for the festival. Most are movies and I am not sure if you can set up an ISO to start at the movie. So I may need to rip to a video file(Mpeg-2 / 4). I know I can create a playlist inside VLC - just don't know if Myth can do this directly.
So the ? is how do you create a video playlist inside MythTV, if you can?
2. I would like to have all of the Myth Frontends play the same content starting at roughly the same time(within a second). I don't want to run to each front end and hit start I want it to automatically start by hitting a button from one location.

I have done some research and have not found much information on either of the two topics. If you find a thread please link me to it and I will research it and post back what I find.

3. Last but certainly not least I would love a way to 'sync' multiple locations. My house and someone elses house. The content would not be streamed but synced. So you would need both locations to have all of the content and the playlist. The only thing that would be streamed(or sent via the net) would be the start / pause(not really necessary but possibly useful) / stop information.

The pipe dream here would be to create a playlist with audio video images and then be able to have it run without you needing to go to each area(on the same network) and playing it.

Thanks everyone ahead of time for any help you can provide.

Rich Shumaker

resmaker,

If you create mpeg files of your movies and drop them in the video directory, then go to the Video Manager (under the Setup menu) - you can highlight a video file, click the "guide" button on your remote, and then edit the metadata. In the metadata you can fill in the checbox for "Play file after this," which will enable the next option "File to always play.." You can then select what video file should be played right after the current one, then edit the metadata for the next one to start the third one, etc. It's not an easy way to set up a playlist, but it should have the desired result - play a string of video files one right after another in order.

Regarding the ability to start multiple front ends (nearly) simultaneously, I recommend researching the telnet access capabilities of MythTV. If each front end has telnet enabled, then armed with the IP address of each front end you might be able to run a script that telnets to each box and starts playing the first video file. It would get through several frontends rather quickly I bet, within a second or so. You might also be able to have that script spawn several simultaneous shell windows on a laptop for instance, that reaches out and starts each front almost at the exact same time. Telnet has a lot of features, including the ability to pause and resume, which might be useful for your third point about syncing multiple locations.

For more information on the options available through telnet, please see this page:
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Telnet_socket

Note that you must enable telnet on the front end and use a specific port, as mentioned at this page:
http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-11.html#ss11.6

If you enable telnet and open ports on routers to be able to send commands over the 'net (say to your neighbor's house), please be sure to limit access at the router level to specific IP addresses that you want to allow access to. This can be a pain with dynamic IPs, but you don't want to have open telnet ports on your frontends accessible to the general Internet!

Hope this was of some help.
Good luck!

Yes that helped very much.
Makes sense too.
Pretty painful way to create a playlist but it solve the multiple location inside the house issue as it automatically (flips / changes / switches) videos inside MythTV. So once I have it started it will continue to play. Even if I had to manually start all the front ends I could fast forward or rewind for a few seconds to sync everything up and it should continue to play everything in order and the timing would be 'close' even if it is not perfect.

I will try to test this out soon.

The telnet option becomes less important now that the playlist can be set up in MythTV - the fests are usually 3 or 4 movies with one break 7 or 8 hours. So setting everything up to be in sync by hand around the house would take a few minutes. Then it would run the rest of the time by itself. Now my only concern is choking my routers and switchers with data. So the real world testing will be cool.

If I set up telnet I will look at the security before I do anything to make sure I don't open myself up to the outside world.

For the low tech option of multiple places around the world I will call them on the phone and manually sync 3, 2, 1....

Thanks again for the help.

I just found out that mplayer has a -slave mode, meaning you can drive it from other programs. Perhaps using telnet or something you might be able to sync it?

Further reading here.

_________________
MBE/FE ~ R5F27 ~ Asus A8N-VM-CSM ~ AMD64 3500+ ~ 1GB RAM ~ 1.5TB Storage ~ Nova-T-500 ~ SH-S183A DVDRW ~ LC20M Case ~ iMON-Pad Remote
FE ~ Diskless ~ Asus M2NPV-VM ~ AMD X2 BE-2350 (45w) ~ 1GB RAM ~ TT Lanbox Lite ~ iMON-Pad Remote