I am trying to display live sports data while watching TV on MythTV. I posted a question about how to do it using mythtvosd in another thread.
I have found another program called xosd which might do the job.
( Link to xosd here: http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man1/osd_cat.1.html)

The problem is that I can't get it to work with MythTV.

My method to test it is to SSH into the machine while the machine is showing live TV. Then I type a command something like this:
osd_cat text_in_file_to_display.txt

It works in a BASH terminal directly on the machine. But in the SSH terminal I get the error:
Error initializing osd: No display

I was amazed that a Google search for this error produced only one unrelated result.

My thought is maybe xosd doesn't work from a remote machine. But I am unconvinced because I found a few discussions on the net where people were using it to display CallerID and it seemed like their machine with the CID modem was different than the one actually displaying the message.

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In the terminal before you run xosd, run this command:This will define DISPLAY so that xosd knows that you want to use screen 0 on xserver 0 on the local machine.

Thanks a lot Greg. You've got me on the right track. At the moment it doesn't quite work. I enter these commands and get the following error.
----------
export DISPLAY=:0.0
osd_cat helloworld.txt

Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server
Xlib: No protocol specified

Error initializing osd: Cannot open display
------------

I don't get any error to the very first "export DISPLAY" command. Only once I enter osd_cat.

Anyways, I'll mess with it some more but if anyone has bright ideas please let me know.

Thanks.

Are you doing it as the root user or as the mythtv user? The mythtv user defines access controls to the xserver that it is running. The default is probably to prevent other users from connecting. You should do it as the mythtv user.

Alternatively, disable access control to the xserver by running this command as the mythtv user in an xterm on your box:

That worked. If you are logged in as the mythtv user then osd_cat will send to the mythtv display after you have entered the export DISPLAY=:0.0 command.

Thanks a lot. I am now going to attempt to call osd_cat from a PHP script. Hopefully I can get that to work.

Thanks.