MythWeather

A weather module plug-in is featured in most home theater PC software ; MythWeather is MythTV's own implementation. Weather information includes current conditions, a short synopsis of forecast information for the following day, a three-day extended weather forecast (today, tomorrow, and the next) and local Doppler radar. Typical weather data includes overall weather conditions, humidity levels, barometric pressure, wind speed and direction, visibility, wind chill factor and the UV index.

A slideshow of information scrolls by every 5 seconds without your intervention, or you can manually scroll back and forth between screens, pause and resume operation using keyboard or remote control inputs. You may also directly input another zipcode while MythWeather is active to view weather information for any given city throughout the United States at your leisure.

MythWeb

MythWeb acts as a frontend counterpart to any browser coming from an external source (recall the master/slave network architecture upon which MythTV is built). Through MythWeb, a user can schedule and manage recordings, change key bindings, and access content from other MythTV plug-ins from a remote location.

MythWeb currently features a module for streaming downloaded content, remote tuner display details on the globally viewable status page, changeable themes, a new statistics display module and settings table editor, and a number of improvements and code fixes from versions gone by.

Author's Opinion

Given the basic official plug-in set, a MythTV frontend can browse a prearranged selection of movie titles with configurable playback choices for audio and video streams, search the Internet for applicable movie metadata or poll RSS news sites for current topics, view the Internet through an integrated browser solution, index a gallery of images, check the current time and weather forecast and send or receive videophone calls through a SIP interface. It can also pose as a fully-featured game and arcade emulator, musical jukebox, and Netflix account summary viewer. That's a fairly nice feature set for a software suite that caters to PVR or home theater PC users.

In a subsequent article, we will cover the unofficial plug-ins for MythTV that implement features well beyond the scope of typical MythTV usage.

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The MythTV Convergence

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