MythFronend Under "Windows Subsystem For Linux"

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digicrat
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MythFronend Under "Windows Subsystem For Linux"

Post by digicrat »

I've had mixed results with the native windows build in the past, so my first thought after installing the anniversary update for Windows 10 was, can we now run the Linux mythfrontend binary directly under Windows/Bash with the help of an X server? The answer is, sort of.

At present I can get video playback working, but haven't figured out how to get sound to work. Any help/ideas would be appreciated.


The setup process so far:
  • Install 'Windows Subsystem for Linux' and Bash. See here for a good guide http://www.howtogeek.com/261417/how-to- ... ash-shell/
  • After installing bash, update it and install mythfrontend: "sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get install mythtv-frontend"
  • Install an X11 Server of your choice, such as XMing, https://sourceforge.net/projects/xming/ and start it.
  • Under bash, add "export DISPLAY=:0" to your ~/.bashrc to allow X11 apps to work
    [*}To fix D-Bus issues in some apps, change it to use TCP sockets. See https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comm ... r_working/
  • When you first run mythfrontend, be sure to decheck "ping server" in the setup page. Ping does not work under Windows/Bash for some reason. Otherwise proceed with setup as usual
  • Video playback, surprisingly, actually works, though it does take an abnormally long time before playback starts

Current Issues:
  • Mythfrontend takes a long time to start with log showing D-bus issues. I suspect something in mythtv needs to be configured to tell it to use TCP sockets for DBus instead of UNIX ones.
  • Using default settings, sound does not work. The logs show unable to connect to PulseAudio errors and any attempt to access the sound settings within the frontend causes it to crash.

I can think of two possible approaches to advance this.

The potentially simpler approach is to figure out how to re-configure Mythfrontend to access pulseaudio via network, instead of the normal UNIX sockets mechanism. If we can do this, then the mythfrontend should be able to stream its audio to a native-Windows build of PulseAudio. See here for installation directions (https://parseq.co.uk/wordpress/archives ... or-windows ) and here for downloads; https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Softwa ... s/Support/.

An approach likely to give better performance in the long-run (at the likely sacrifice of some features), would be to re-configure mythfrontend to use VLC (specifically, the native Windows build of VLC) as its player and to control it via either a socket/telnet or HTTP interface. The former is supported by myth, but I haven't found any indication that the latter is. Worst case would require either modifying myth to support the interface, or creating a dummy vlc program that wraps between the CLI and network one.
zaphod
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Re: MythFronend Under "Windows Subsystem For Linux"

Post by zaphod »

I started a separate thread for Ubuntu mythtvfrontend on Windows WSLg.

viewtopic.php?f=25&t=4986
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