XMPP for TV

(copying www-archive which is a public list for ad hoc archival,
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ ... feel free to keep or drop in
your reply)

Hi there,

I just found your posts about a MythTV Jabber wrapper,
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/321048?search_string=jabber;#321048

To date I have never invested the time in making MythTV work, but I
have made some similar experiments wrapping XBMC-based media centres
with XMPP. This is part of an EU project, "NoTube" which gives me a
bit of time to look at TV metadata and interop. I'm trying to make a
case to my project collaborators that XMPP is the perfect "glue" to
connect up Web, mobile, desktop, set top box and media centre TV
systems. My take is that it should be feasible to make a decent 2-way
and smart "universal remote" protocol over XMPP, allowing rich
annotations, personalised EPGs etc in handsets, and a very loose
coupling between such 'remotes' and players. So far my experiment
consists only of a few lines of code that will pause an XMBC player
(Boxee, Plex, etc) if a jabber message is received, and which returns
some poorly structured fields representing the player's current state.
Since my background is Web standards, I'd like to take this and work
it up into a spec that's small enough for quick/cheap implementation,
but rich enough that things like xmbc and mythtv can be usefully
operated over the protocol, at least for the TV/video viewing part.

I started a thread over on the XMPP list, see
http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/social/2009-August/000544.html

In the mythtv main thread about your code it quickly trails off into
talk about whether you're using the right internal APIs, etc. Are you
still maintaining or developing the code
(http://www.ian-barton.com/wiki/MythTV/MythJabberbot etc)? Have you
considered using it as a remote control interface to MythTV, or
thought much about adding access control layers to the system?

thanks for any thoughts,

cheers,

Dan

Received on Friday, 18 September 2009 07:25:11 UTC