MythTV port?

[Craig Treleaven]

Hi:

I've been running MythTV on Mac OS X for a number of years. 
<http://www.mythtv.org/>  The core functionality is wonderful but the 
build and install process on Mac is pretty darn painful!

A capsule summary for those of you not familiar.  MythTV is a digital 
video recording system with other components for DVD/BR videos, 
internet video, music, slide shows, etc.  There is a master backend 
that handles scheduling recordings and serving media to one or more 
frontends.  The master backend stores all its information in a MySQL 
database.  There can also be slave backends that provide additional 
TV tuners and storage.  The simplest configuration is a single 
machine running the master backend, MySQL database and frontend. 
MythTV is Linux-first with ports to Mac OS, Windows and BSD.  Lots of 
people run the backend on Linux with a mix of frontends.

About 6 years ago, the backend was ported to Mac OS X when a couple 
of tuning methods became available on OS X (firewire and Silicon 
Dust's HDHomerun boxes).  Only the frontend had been available before 
that.  A MythTV-developed Perl script continued to be used to build a 
.app bundle--it was expanded to bundle the backend as well as the 
frontend.  The problem is that the backend is not a double-clickable 
Mac app.  The backend is a server process more akin to MySQL. MythTV 
is just about to release version 0.25 with a ton of interesting new 
features.

Which leads me to MacPorts.  It occurs to me that using MacPorts to 
build and install the backend might make the process a lot easier and 
automate some of the tougher parts (installing a startupitem for the 
backend).  The hard part is that Myth is a pretty extensive 
application with a number of dependencies--Nokia's QT plus several 
libraries, MySQL, and some Perl modules just for the core system. 
I'm done some searching and I think MacPorts has existing ports for 
all the dependencies except two Perl modules.

So, am I crazy?  I'm not a developer but I've been building my own 
MythTV system with the Perl script for some years.  I'd like to 
contribute to a better all-Mac MythTV experience but I would 
certainly need a bunch of help and support to get a functioning 
MacPorts port file.  Anybody else interested?

Craig