Some of the shows I record do not play correctly using the internal player. This problem is discussed here: http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/dev/317736#317736
There is already a ticket in to address the real problem.

However, in the mean time, it turns out that the videos that do not play well with the internal player work just fine in xine. So, I would like to add a menu item in the recorded programs screen to choose to play a particular recording with xine instead of the default player. Is there an easy way to add this or would it require modifying the mythtv source code?

Cheers,
John

I think you're looking at a source code change there, and not a trivial one.

There are other tricks you could do, like putting a symbolic link to /myth/tv in the /myth/video directory, but that leads to several other complications. You could add a menu item higher up, say under Media Library, which ran xine pointing at /myth/pretty, but then your problem is that it will autostart with the first thing it finds and you'll have to work out how to get to the recording that you want.

Yeah, those are the problems that I am seeing as well.

The idea of using MythVideo is interesting, though. In the setup for mythvideo there is a way to enter a unique player command for each of the videos that I have. Suppose I add a link to pretty in /myth/video. I wonder if I could somehow automatically filter through the links in pretty and change the unique player command for only the shows that I have a problem with. Where is that unique command (and other video meta-data) stored when I change it for a particular video?

John

Database of course. Looks like it's in the "videometadata" table as the "playcommand" column.

Any idea what triggers that database to be updated? In other words, when I add a new file (or link) into the /myth/video directory, when and how will that video get added to the videometadata table? Does it happen when I start the video browser? Is there a way I could force that update from a shell script?

There is a scan command which you can initiate from the menu. There's probably a way to do it from the command line, but you'll have to search.

Adding custom commands after the fact should just take a simple mysql update statement.