Hi everyone. - I would like to find a way to have KnoppMyth automatically go straight into "Watch TV" mode upon boot. I've set up a KnoppMyth box to output a signal to televisions in a public viewing area (a college cafeteria). I've then used mythtvosd to set up scrolling text messages across the screen that are generated through a web page (informational messages related to cancelled classes, etc.). I would like the system to be comletely hands off, and able to recover all by itself from power interruptions, etc. At this point, everything works great except that one has to physically hit the enter key to select "Watch TV" to get things started. Does anyone know of a way to have mythfrontend start up and go directly into watch tv mode instead of waiting at the main menu? I haven't been able to find anything on the forum or through Google so far. Many thanks for any ideas!

You could probably figure out whatever command the web-based menu system uses, and go that way. Just insert a script in the startup somewhere. This would probably be a good admin tool for you (telnet/socket/web-based remote control), as you could control the boxes remotely. i.e. switch channels to breaking news, etc..

I haven't done this, but it's one approach.
Another one would be to see how LIRC works

Looking around you could probably write a script that connects to the telnet socket of MythTV and command it that way. In theory you should be able to do it locally after the frontend has started.

Here is the MythTV Doco: http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-11.html#ss11.6. There is also more info in the wiki: http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Telnet_socket.

So the theory is:
1. Start up computer
2. Start mythfrontend
3. Pause giving frontend time to start
4. Telnet to local computer
5. issue command to start livetv

If you do write a script to do this, it would be nice if you posted it back to share it with the rest of the group.

Good luck.

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Girkers

Thank you for the excellent guidance!

I did manage to get this to work using telnet in a script on the local machine. The computer boots up, automatically starts watching tv, and displays the messages just as I had hoped. I'm pasting the script below in the interest of sharing. Please note that I am pretty much a noob at linux and scripting, so this script is probably pretty messy - but it works for what I'm doing. The part of the script that does what I asked about (starting Watch TV automatically) is simply this one line:



For background info, this script grabs a plain text file from a web server and displays the text in that file as a scrolling message across the top of the screen. The contents of that text file are modified by a web based form that certain people on campus can access to enter new messages. Each time the script cycles, it pulls the file again, in case there are any new messages, like "Professor so-an-so's classes are cancelled today due to illness." We are also going to use the web-based remote control option to change channels remotely, if something comes up that the administration would like the TVs tuned to.

Again, thanks for the guidance on starting the Watch TV feature automatically. Here's the script:

That's a cool script!

Hm.. the telnet interface is interesting. And it's got built-in help for commands. Nice.

For those wanting to play, install telnet as root:


then



To see the jump points:

And don't forget to enable network control interface under General settings, and restart the frontend to use telnet.

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