A little tale of “you never know until you try”. I have been wondering for ages what to do about having to separate media serving solutions in the house — XBMC on the hacked XBoxes for doing music and transcoded movies, and MythTV for TV shows. I wasn’t exactly losing sleep over it, but I couldn’t help thinking that at some stage I would have to switch to one system for everything if the concept was going to gain wider acceptance with other members of the household. 🙂
I had played with the MythTV frontend for XBMC a few times, but each time there seemed to be something wrong with it. Either dodgy config, Samba problems, or insufficient bandwidth over the wireless. So I figured that conversion to MythTV and plugins like MythVideo and MythMusic would be in my future.
Then, I realised something wonderful. All the files I was creating on MythTV had an extension “.mpg”. On a whim, I set up ccxstream (the XBMSP streaming server) on the MythTV box (sometimes it’s good to run Gentoo for this stuff) and pointed my XBMC at it.
It played. IT PLAYED!!! XBMC saw that it was MPEG2 (and good) and Just Played It.
Now I’m sure many readers are looking for a virtual wet fish to poke me in the eye with. I don’t know why I never thought to try it before, especially after I set the “Transcode” option on all my recordings in MythTV. But with Mythrename set up to give the recordings sensible filenames, I’m happy — most importantly so is Susan, who took the opportunity to watch some of the episodes of her soap using the XBox.
There still is the issue of XBMC freezing occasionally (nothing to do with the MPEG2 stuff from MythTV as it does it with MP4s too, probably something thermal), and the nagging question mark over network bandwidth, but I get the feeling that my mythical killer home entertainment platform is within my grasp.
Crossed Wires 