MythTV News

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For whatever reason the MythTV frontend is not available for Windows. It is meant to run on Linux and it also runs on MacOS. Windows users have had to settle for limited functionality in either “MythTv player“, WinMyth or Tapeworm. They will let you watch your recordings, and also LiveTV (not Tapeworm), but you cannot schedule recordings and you don’t have access to all the settings or the plugins.

Which is why it is interesting to see that there is actually work going on, trying to get the same source code which is used for the Linux and MacOS versions, to compile for Windows. It is far from finished yet, but based on the userbase I assume that there might be some developers out there interested in helping.

Here is the current status of the MythTV frontend on Windows:

Things that work:

Frontend

UI works fine, including OpenGL painter
Live TV and recorded TV playback
Video playback (mythvideo), including ISO images of DVD disks
Program guide

Plugins

MythVideo - works fine
MythControls

Things that can be compiled but have not been tested:

mythtranscode, mythcommflag, MythMusic (including libvisual and sdl), MythGallery, MythWeather, MythMovies

Things that don’t work:

Backend: no video capture (though it shouldn’t be too hard to implement DirectShow-based capture), does not respond to socket connections
Frontend: there’s a major problem with the “tv_out” QWidget caused by the fact that it’s created on a different thread (not the main UI thread). In Windows this causes all sorts of problems, the worst of which is the frontend hanging when trying to switch to program guide from live tv.
CD ripping: it looked like it was going to take too long to port cdparanoia to Windows so I ended up disabling ripping altogether
CD playback: windows cd device handling needs to be implemented in libcdaudio

Until the status improves the best option for Windows users might be MythWeb + MythStreamTV or DSMyth.

Related posts:
MythTV Windows port receiving lots of attention lately
Build script for Windows MythTV Frontend
MythTV Windows Frontend upgraded
Unofficial Windows frontend - MythTv Player - updated for 0.21
MythTV Windows “Frontend” updated

Filed under: MythTV, MythWeb, Windows