My housemates and I have used MythTV for most of our TV access for somewhere around 2 years now. During that period of time, MythTV presented us with an extremely large number of failures. We used to experience a really horrible bug where the video would freeze (this correlated well with poor DVB signal strength), and so we configured “Ctrl-Alt-x” to kill the frontend process and start it again. This got used frequently. However, more recently we had an even more painful bug, where the frontend would always quit after playing less than a minute of video. This made it impossible to watch anything.
So, I sat down one evening a few weeks ago and bodged together “MythFace”, a MythTV client designed to do one thing: let you watch MythTV’s recordings.
As you can see, the interface is the pinnacle of usability and fits in well with many GNOME applications that have no configuration options. When you click “play”, the selected recording is played using mplayer. MythFace relies on the MythTV recordings directory being mounted at /mnt/video (we use an NFS export), and uses the GMyth library to grab the listings.
We’ve been using this interface since I wrote it and I don’t think we’ve had any issues with it. I think a major bonus of MythFace over MythTV is that it’s much faster to interact with due to the absence of a skinned interface.
Source is available on Gitorious:
git clone git://gitorious.org/mythface/mainline.git
2 Responses to “MythFace: An alternative interface to MythTV”
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Site by Robert Spanton. ©2008
June 14th, 2008 at 2:20 am
This is exactly the kind of software I enjoy. It loads instantly, has a great interface and, crucially, doesn’t suck. It is superior to mythfrontend in every regard.
June 23rd, 2008 at 10:37 pm
[...] MythTV frontend is too much of a beast to start, when all you want to do is watch a show, then MythFace might be for [...]