I’ve been using MythTV for a few years now and now find it an indispensable part of my media setup. So, I recently went back to Knoppmyth because my mythdora box was acting up. Well, I got podget all set up again to download my video podcasts, but I couldn’t get MythTV to play the playlists it generated. First, it wouldn’t play them at all, then I figured out the new version of knoppmyth was using a “mplayer-resume.pl” script to start the videos which generates a file with a time stamp each time you watch a video so you can resume where you left off. Well, this didn’t work well with playlists and I don’t really need to resume anyway, so I changed it back to running mplayer directly. Well, that wasn’t enough either since you have to add the -playlist option to tell mplayer that it’s a playlist. So, I added a new extension in the media settings for m3u playlist files:

mplayer -fs -zoom -quiet -vo xv -playlist %s

Well, that would play them , but I was only getting sound, no video.

So, after a few days of searching, and talking on IRC, I finally discovered that I had a typo and used -vo vx instead of -vo xv. This option apparently tells mplayer which video driver to use, so it’s kind of picky. BTW, the above line is the correct line. So, the lesson learned, is to double check when manually transferring command lines.