In the Year 2000...

Dear Lazyweb,

I have a lot of ripped CDs and DVDs; I use MythTv and I have a mac.

And I want to access them all using Frontrow *and* Mythfrontend.

Thanks, Gary

This is one of those problems where the pieces are all 99% there, but not enough people want the solution bad enough (myself included) to put them all together.

Firefly can take a collection of mp3s and serve them up to iTunes/Frontrow. It can even handle video to an extent (must be mov or m4v). That is 50% of the problem, leaving only a way to get at the Myth TV shows.

There are several ways this could probably be handled. To me, the path of least resistance would be this:
1. A vlc setup to transcode and stream the MPEG-2 Myth tv shows into something iTunes can swallow. This is already doable.
2. A plugin for Firefly that will a) query mythtv using either the database or UPnP and then b) stream the video from vlc. There will be a little bit of glue that is needed to map items exported by the database/UPnP to urls for vlc.

I have two weeks off at Christmas. Maybe it's time to get my hands dirty and give something back to the community I've enjoyed for so long.