Is it possible to change the default player in utilities/setup -> setup -> media settings -> video settings -> player settings so it calls a script? What I am trying to do is when I go to watch a movie and select the movie, it will call the script, which will turn the lights off, via X10, then start the movie with mplayer.

Absolutely. I use a script to determine the type of file based on the extension, do whatever is necessary then play it (back before Xine could play a .iso directly).

Just be sure to enter the entire path in the player definition. If it requires root access you may need to prefice it with sudo and include the script in your /etc/sudoers file.

it still will not work, I have checked the full path several times and still nothing works. when i select the movie the screen turns black and the script does not execute. the first thing the script is suppose to do is log to a file for testing purposes, and it does not do that. it is almost like it is not getting called. And anyone can execute the script and mythtv is the owner/creator

But what is the script doing? If whatever it does requires root access, be sure to If you open an Xterm and run the script (as the mythtv user) do you see errors? If it's not too long perhaps you could post the script.

I would be happy to post the script.



As you can see it writes to a file "logger.txt" to verify it has ran. then writes to another file "house_cmd.txt" which misterhouse checks and runs the commands written to the file. The last part is commented out until the lights turn off and the script will run. If I run the script from the command line as the mythtv user, the light turns off just fine. That is why I am confused as to why it will not run when called from myth. It will not even write to the first file to verify it runs.

I will preface this advise with: I am not an experienced programmer, but I have an idea of what I am doing.

As to your script, I suspect it is permissions/directories. What I mean is when you run the script from the command line it works as it knows what directory to place the txt files in, the current one. When you call the script from within Myth I personally don't know what the current directory is, so you might find that your script is trying to write the txt files to a directory it doesn't have permission.

Could I suggest you explicitly define the paths for the txt files to a location that you know the MythTV user has permission too.

I hope this helps.

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Girkers

As Girkers mentioned, best to absolute path your files. You may be writing to a logger.txt file, but in a different directory than you expect (or you can't write to the current directory, so the script exits). Something like
This way you always know where your files should be.

What is the name of your script and where is it located? And what is the output from

here is the output from the select statement



I also verified in the player settings that this was correct also.



that is the directory where mythl, which is a perl script is located.

do I need the .pl on the player setting? I also tried running the script with all absolute paths and it still did not work.

Hi,

I probably know even less about programming however I add the -w switch after the perl so it shows some debug on the script.

Also when you call the script do preface it with perl?
$ perl <myscript.pl> else it may try to run it a s a shell script.

Mike

Yes, if that's the name of the script. /myth/misterhouse/mythl is NOT equal to /myth/misterhouse/mythl.pl