MythTV, podcasts and my new converged life experience
Haven't posted in a while, but in that time I've had a few projects underway. I discovered a plugin for MythTV called MythStream, and one of the things I've been up to is getting that integrated with my Myth box. After a fair amount of tweaking, mostly on the UI side to get it to look like my Myth theme and fit on the TV screen nicely, it's now running and, boy, is it sweet. It has a rudimentary podcast client built into it, which means all those podcasts I miss in the car or that I want Stephanie to hear can now be easily accessible here at home. I say "rudimentary" not to slam the author in any way -- I'm extremely grateful -- but simply because it doesn't have a lot of the features that iPodder or iTunes have. I'm talking about things like expiring content, automatically checking feeds on a timed basis, that sort of stuff. The parsers MythStream depends on are just Perl scripts, so I could hack those up and/or set up some cron jobs to get those features, but I'll just wait until it becomes a major inconvenience not to have them. I'm also loving the raison d'existance for the plugin, streaming audio and video feeds. Someone on the Myth list posted a SQL script that dumps all of the BBC streams into the database so that I can easily navigate and choose from them with my remote. My exposure to streamed content is going to increase dramatically, I think. Before, Shoutcast and C-SPAN Radio constituted the bulk of my streaming use.
Anyway, if you have a MythTV box, get MythStream. It's worth the hassle of setting up. If you do not have MythTV, why are you reading this?