MythVideo
MythVideo is a frontend interface that allows you to index, browse and watch video files from within the frontend. It can work with with many popular media players and codecs, has a choice of interfaces and can be configured to retrieve program information and artwork from the internet.
MythVideo neither runs on the backend server nor uses the backend server to stream the video files.
It is important to note that MythVideo will only play media files that are stored on the local frontend machine or on a networked drive available to the local frontend machine.
Install MythVideo
$ sudo apt-get install mythvideo
Configuring MythVideo
Basic configuration of MythVideo is found in frontend setup Utilities/Setup==>Setup==>Media Settings==>Videos Settings
It is beyond the scope of this guide to provide complete setup descriptions and options. For more information, see the external links at the end of this page.
- General Settings
The most important setting is the very first- Directory that holds videos: which tells MythVideo where to look for your videos. Note that MythVideo will look in more than one directory if you enter a colon seperated list.
- Player Settings
this is where you configure which player to use and how it is launched. The default is to launch mplayer in full screen mode, which is enough to get you started.
Video Manager
The video manager is accessed via Utilities/Setup==>Setup==>Video Manager and is where you can perform a myriad of operations on your video files. including: retrieving program information and artwork, setting parental control levels, organizing into categories and more.
Playing Videos
Videos are accessed via Media Library==>Watch Videos
|
One of MythVideo's Library view |
|
A video selection with metadata and artwork |
Proprietary Codec Support
Out of the box, MythTV has support to playback anything that is supported from ffmpeg as of the last checkout in MythTV. This means that it can even play back proprietary formats up to wmv2 in the internal player. If you are looking for a very streamlined solution, you should stick with the internal player for everything. Unfortunately, you may run into bugs and want to try other players as described below. Also, if you are interested in playing commercial DVDs, you will need to install libdvdcss2.
see Media Support and codecs for more information
Switching From the Internal Player
By default, the mythvideo and mythdvd packages will use the internal DVD player built into myth. If this doesn't work well for some of your content, I would recommend installing xine-ui. It easily goes fullscreen and is very configurable to handle most of your content.
$ sudo apt-get install xine-ui libxine-extracodecs
When you configure mythvideo and mythdvd's default players, here is a sane line that you can insert to use xine for the players:
$ xine -f --auto-play=q -l --no-splash --no-logo