Just today, Apple announced a new verison of FrontRow (their semi-answer to Windows Media Center) for supported Macs (iMac G5 Rev 2, iMac with Intel processor, Mac mini with Intel processor, MacBook Pro) which adds a new feature of being able to view content that's stored on other Macs through the technology Apple calls Bonjour (formerly Rendezvous). Bonjour, however, is just a marketing name for zero-conf, a standard which is supported by Linux.

So... This got me thinking... Does anyone think it would be possible to write a daemon to run on a MythTV box that uses zero-conf and masquerades as another Mac, just sharing out video files? I think this would be really cool.

Now, I do realize there is a MythTV frontend for MacOS, but it won't compile on Intel Macs, and the PowerPC binary for it doesn't really run all that well under Rosetta (for reference, the PowerPC mythfrontend binary takes about 75% of BOTH cores of my 1.83 GHz Intel iMac to play back a 6Mbps MPEG-2 stream). Also, FrontRow is absolutely beautiful and is integrated in a perfectly seamless way with the OS.

I'm a pretty good programmer, so I might start looking into working on this myself, but I don't have all that much free time, and I don't really have the expertise necessary to reverse-engineer Apple's network protocol (yes, I realize that Bonjour is standards-compliant, but that's only so one machine can find the other, not necessarily the way the actual media files are shuffled between them).

If anyone thinks they can lend a hand, let me know.

As zeroconf is availalbe for Linux, I don't think you have to masq anything. You should just have to configure it and go...

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cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

I wasn't suggesting that you'd have to masquerade zero-conf and/or Bonjour, but you'd probably have to masquerade the daemon as iTunes.

Not to rain on your parade but durring the length of time it takes you to get this to work the mythTV community will probaly get the frontend to compile correctly on x86 OSX.

I agree, but this would still be pretty sweet.

Although I guess I can settle for someone figuring out how to get the Mac OS mythfrontend app to be controllable by the Apple Remote. As it is, I think it's only compatible with what Apple wants it to be compatible with.

I use myth2ipod and so my shows already show up in FrontRow, before the update. But you could use daapd to do this as apparently people already do. Unfortunately, FrontRow with Bonjour downloads the entire video before playing it. So I recommend using myth2ipod to do what you want.

As a stop gap why approach this in such a complex way. Automount /myth/pretty on your mac, and symlink or create an alias into your user/Movies folder. Whalla, they show up in FrontRow. Now, yea they don't have the info, but it works, it plays, and it is a lot less work than the alternative right now. Using myth2ipod also works, and it will show up as a Video Podcast. But I am having problems with the Frontend running on my mini since R5A22 with SVN, and even .19, so this is my only solution right now.

Whoa! I never knew that existed. That's awesome. Well, that looks like a solution to me.

Now to just clean up the script so it makes a nice tree structure (and of course submit my changes back to the community).

If that's the case, then we could really use your help on the Mac port of the frontend. I have neither an Intel Mac, nor enough time to do much work on the Mac MythTV port.

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| Nigel Pearson, nigel.pearson.au@gmail.com
| "Things you own end up owning you" - Tyler, Fight Club

I am new to this forum and I'm piecing together a knoppmythTV machine right now, I can't see Apple getting to a PVR too soon - I'm was thinking about incorporating wifi and bonjour into the box, to enable it to sit in my mac home network and also serve some slimdevices.

As I understand it Apple offer everything needed to compile Bonjour on Linux.

http://developer.apple.com/networking/bonjour/

There is a book available (O'Reilly)-Quite cheap on Amazon, written by Stuart Cheshire, who works for Apple. I have emailed with him in the past about Bonjour and he is really helpful.

I am not a programmer, but I have dabbled with trying to run Bonjour over a VPN.
There is not masquerading needed, you tell Bonjour to broadcast which services it supplies, e.g fileserver, http, video, etc. Or connections to filemounts (in this case Bonjour is acting as locator beacon), especially nifty if your server is behind or with a DHCP/NAT subnet.

I'm not sure about connecting to iTunes though, i think there is some kind of validation lockdown to keep it iTunes->iTunes within a subnet, so you would have to open a stream - however the easier option would be to run a streaming server like slimserver or QTSS (open source- Darwin Streaming Server).