XBMC comes to Android [LWN.net]

XBMC comes to Android

Posted Jan 11, 2013 0:57 UTC (Fri) by n8willis (editor, #43041)
In reply to: XBMC comes to Android by wookey
Parent article: XBMC comes to Android

Yes and no. Or sort of. There is support for generic PVR front-endedness -- a different add-on than the preceding MythBox add-on, which only browsed Recorded Programs. Though like I mentioned, it's a couple of releases behind MythTV (and since Myth changes its db format regularly, that's a serious incompatibility (though ultimately that's MythTV's fault, since the way it is designed requires all front-ends to open a live MySQL connection to the back-end database....)).

Anyway, the thing about the new XBMC PVR functionality is that it is front-end stuff only. It does have an EPG and a UI for scheduling and managing record rules, but it requires a separate back end, and on Linux that means, yep, MythTV. Ans as you're no doubt aware, MythTV is so screwy to configure that any change to ditch part of it is a welcome opportunity, but the back-end config is probably more convoluted than the front end, so this is just a partial fix.

Maybe someday, though....

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XBMC comes to Android

Posted Jan 11, 2013 1:00 UTC (Fri) by grantma (subscriber, #5225) [Link]

Android RC3 build includes cmyth PVY client which works on MythTV 0.26.

Am I going to Y E A H!

XBMC comes to Android

Posted Jan 11, 2013 12:22 UTC (Fri) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]

OK. Nice. That's definitely progress.

MythTV's design choice requiring version sync across all clients/backend does indeed turn out to have been an unhelpful one, but I guess that wasn't obvious when they started.

There are other PVR backends are there not? Such as 'DVR' and I see 'TVHeadend' on the myth wiki. I've not tried either of these but they are probably easier to configure than mythtv :-) The backend when doing digital recording from USB is pretty simple: select channel and record stream at specified time, keep and expose a list, optionally run transcode and ad-remove processes. It's rather more fiddly with analogue TV cards. Most of the hard bit (UI, display technologies) seems to me to be in the front end. Hmm. I suppose the EPG database has to be in the back-end if delivered over the air. That complicates matters.