It's the night before the night before Christmas, and soon we'll have a house full of relatives. How to impress everyone with my new Myth box, without distracting from the holiday? How 'bout a slideshow set to music?
The slideshow is easy: use the Myth Gallery to show your digital photos. Currently, it can't traverse directories. So if you've got a nicely-arranged (year/month/activity) folder tree, just copy the good ones out into a "flat" folder and use that for the slideshow.

Now about music? Sure, MythMusic will work. You can oogle and awe at the visual effects. But what about the slideshow? They can't really run at the same time, can they?

I've figured out a non-elegant but effective way around this. Just run a command-line mplayer in the background. I spent an hour figuring it out and here's how:

1) I'm using a Chaintech AV-710, with the "The (I hope it's the definitive) .asoundrc for nForce2 and nForce4" from this page:
http://www.mythtv.info/moin.cgi/DigitalSoundHowTo

2) I invoke mplayer like this:
mplayer -ao alsa:device=digital -playlist /myth/music/playlist.txt

(This is where I ran into trouble - and if your audio isn't like mine, it may need tuning. For me, "digital" works, thanks to the .asoundrc (or is it alsa.conf?) from step 1.

3) playlist.txt looks like this:
/myth/music/Jim Brickman/The Gift/12 - Dreams Come True.ogg
/myth/music/Jim Brickman/The Gift/13 - The Gift.ogg
/myth/music/Amy Grant/HFC/01 - Have Yourself a Merry Little.ogg
/myth/music/Amy Grant/HFC/02 - Its the Most Wond_Year.ogg

(It's longer, chopped for clarity)

I had to make the playlist myself, as the MythMusic one is in the database. A neat trick would be to make a script that pulls the playlist out using SQL and formats into the playlist.txt

4) Just run the command, and it'll start playing. You could do it in an xterm before running the slideshow. I'm doing it from my PC in the other room via telnet (putty). You could make a menu entry, I think. It didn't like being run in the background though. I've got it in /usr/local/bin/playmusic.sh and if I run playmuic.sh& it will crash. So for now, I'm happy just doing it the way I'm doing it. I don't have Lirc figured out yet (should I program the remote to learn the Lirc commands, or program Lirc to use the remote commands? Such a conunumdrum) but that would probably be a good option (kick off the script in the background from Lirc.)

Anyway, I wanted to write this down before I forgot how I did it, and figured I'd write it here. Maybe somebody can impress their mother-in-law! I know mine will like it. It'll beat having my wife and the other women trying to talk over LOTR, like the last time I tried to impress people with my TV.

Such a wanted feature in Myth Gallery, oh well maybe one day Mythmusic and MythGallery will get together and make baby MythMedias

Viewing Album art of other albums while listening to music would be cool too.

I can't see a reason why you can't spin off a thread to run mplayer in the background when you launch mythgallery, then kill of that thread when you exit back to the menu.

As with the earlier post, there isn't a simple way to use the MythMusic playlists, but you may wish to select specific music for the background for your images that you wouldn't otherwise be playing.

-Rusty

_________________
Master:
- AMD 1800XP on a MSI KT4V motherboard, via KT400 bios
- 120 G Segate Baracuda /, /cache, /myth, swap
- 200 G Segate Baracuda /myth/tv
- 3 Haupauge! WinTV PVR250s
- 19" Daewoo Monitor (1280x1024 ni)

That would be preferable to my current method of running in another console window, and then having to kill it when done.


I suppose a proper implementation would allow for a playlist to be associated with each folder in the gallery. Possibly just a text file wtih a list of songs or referring to playlists in the database, with a directive as to whether to interrupt the current song (fade out maybe?) or wait for it to finish. But that's only useful when the gallery can traverse directories, or use a "playlist" of its own. Then you could have some nice synchronized slideshows. I should probably post this to the mythusers list, as it's OT for KnoppMyth.