Our next step is installing MythWeb, a web based listings viewer and recording portal for the Live TV. Using our old friend havetheknowhow.com, at the bottom of the Install MythTV tutorial is "How to Configure MythWeb". If you haven't already done so then you should follow this part of the guide. Now the web based interface should be accessible on http://
Once you've recorded a program and gone into 'Recorded Programmes' you should see a thumbnail of the program with two icons next to it just like this:
The top icon is to stream the video from the server. It opens a .asx file that will then play the video across the LAN. We have VLC Player installed on all staff machines in school so we open the file with this and it plays without any problems. Should you want to use Windows Media Player to play the recording, you will need to install dsmyth codecs available at sourceforge.net. Should the file need to be directly downloaded then the clipboard icon is for this function.
These icons will be important later on but for now we will move on and configure the system to be able to store DVDs. In order to add DVD videos to our system, we have to install MythVideo. This will add an "Optical Disks" option in the MythTV Frontend where we can rip DVDs and they will be accessible through MythWeb in the Videos section.
In Synaptic Update Manager, search for MythVideo, Mark for Installation and Apply and now the Optical Disk option should be available. If you now go in to the menu and rip a DVD, it should also appear in MythWeb in Videos. For more information on MythVideo, setup and installation the MythVideo wiki is a good place to start. The only issue I had setting the system to rip DVDs was that when I clicked Begin, nothing happened. This was because in the Backend, Storage Directories for Videos did not have a path. Entering /var/lib/mythtv/videos solved the issue and then ripping commenced.
Looking in our Videos section now of MythWeb we should see the name of the DVD we ripped or set at the ripping stage. However the only option to play the video is by clicking the title to start a Direct Download. If you install VLC player with the Mozilla Firefox plugin you can watch the video in the Firefox browser. For us though this was not an option as we restrict users to Internet Explorer so we can control settings with Group Policy. Therefore the easiest way to distribute videos that are not TV Recordings is to stream them the same way as recorded programmes. Mythweb however does not have this function natively.
A lot of googling later (a LOT of googling), I came across the MythVideo Streaming Hack. The article mentions enabling it for MP4 video files so after checking with the author of the article (thank you to Sune for replying to me and helping me out), I was able to add the same streaming capabilities to ripped videos as recorded ones. On the Streaming Hack web page, there are some MythWeb patches that require to be run which can be downloaded from here. If, like me, you have no idea how to apply a Linux patch then hopefully this tutorial (again kindly hinted at by Sune) will help.
Note: Any Mythweb update will overwrite the patch files and so remove the new streaming icons - as I have found to my detriment!
So we now have a Media server capable of not only recording and streaming TV programmes but now also streaming a Video Library which makes this a great option to link to Sharepoint for Teaching and Learning materials. In the next part, we will look at how to do this, how others have set up their systems to do the same, and how to watch Live TV from another computer using MythTV Player.
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