Well things have been progressing on the Gloss front, not with massive steps, but constant. I’m hoping to have a second webcast up later this week that will demo the new features such as Live TV and DVD watching.

Gloss has also been given a more permanent home on Google Code. It can be found at http://code.google.com/p/gloss-mc/ and has an SVN repo that is getting about 1 revision a day at the moment. It also has a set of instructions for getting it up and running on Ubuntu. These instructions require further testing so if anyone wants to try them out and let me know how you go I’d appreciate it.

I’ve also made the decision the make Gloss purely a drop-in replacement for Myth frontend. Its now heavily reliant on a Myth server being present as it will look for both the MySQL db and a backend server for Live TV. With these changes a lot of the nasty hardcoded paths and things have been removed and if you run Gloss on a machine with that is already setup as a mythfrontend, it should pickup the relevant config files for your server.

So here’s what’s been done since the last post:

• VERY basic implementation of the Myth backend/frontend streaming protocol. Doesn’t yet have the ability to change channels etc, but DOES show live TV over a network. Its also using a very ugly buffering method that will have to change in some way, but I’ve been unable to get gstreamer reading directly from a tcp socket so its all I’ve got so far.
• DVD player module. Very early stages. Can play chapters but no menus etc
• Slideshow module is now nearly complete. It can also reference mythgallery settings for paths and also play music over the slideshow
• Video module is started. Pulls video metadata from the Myth DB and display covers etc but palying is pretty raw
• ‘Rolling’ menus. Previously a menu would simply show as many items as it contained which could lead to items being offscreen. Now the menu display size can be set and when moving onto items that are not shown, the menu will ‘roll’ to bring them into view. Still a little buggy though.

The next few things I’m hoping to get done are more media centric. I want to get the functionality into the modules before I start going around polishing things up. So the TODO list goes:

• Channel changing of live tv. Shouldn’t be too difficult but requires cleaning up of the protocol code.
• On screen display. I want to try and use a universal OSD that can be used across modules for pausing, skipping etc. Its getting to the point where this is needed.
• Advance the video player module a bit. Its currently very rough and incomplete (Mainly because I got a little bored with it) but shouldn’t take much to get it functional. I’m just a little unsure of how I want the interface for this to work at the moment.

So anyway, that’s where things are today. Like I said, hopefully there should be another screencast later this week.