MythTV Setup Series- Use Alternate Player
The MythTV internal player uses FFmpeg, which isn't a player, but it is the internals used by many popular players, such as mplayer. Many FFmpeg developers are also part of the MPlayer project. FFmpeg is used by VLC media player, MPlayer, xine, HandBrake, and others. With that being said, the MythTV implementation seems to have limitations. It doesn't digest highly compressed H.264 video very well. It seems to have problems tracking and refreshing properly on them, much like can be observed with SMPlayer. In fact, I have found videos that play best in VLC and others that play best in SMPlayer. Although VLC, like the MythTV player, uses FFmpeg, VLC has a wide variety of internal codecs and can play certain videos much better.
Users want the option to use an alternate player other than the internal player. MythTV has an option in the settings to configure an alternate player to use IN ADDITION to the internal player! Our goal here is to configure VLC as the alternate player.
Using VideoLAN Player for playback in MythTV (otherwise known as VLC Player) for all video files or certain video files.
The subject is covered in the Official MythTV Wiki (MythTV VLC).
The location in the Front End is:
- Setup, Media Settings, Video Settings, Player Settings
Note: VLC Player exists without playing video. UNRESOLVED.
The reason is due to the way MythTV uses STORAGE GROUPS for your video files (those not recorded using MythTV). If you have MythTV configured to access a path containing video files (such as a LAN path or NFS path, or even local) the MythTV Frontend sees this in a Storage Group. SG = Storage Group. MythTV will not allow Storage Group content to be played with an external player such as VLC. (Yeah this is a sucky deal and a strike against MythTV.)
For example, /var/lib/mythtv/videos is seen by MythTV and sent to the external player as myth://Videos@localhost, which is a storage group path.
further research and reading
