I was hoping someone here could create some plugin or something but until there isn't such plugin this mod is useless. You won't have sound!
So going further with this wouldn't make sense.

Hi all!

I can see why you would want to install an app like MPD. I too want to play music without have to power on the tv. IMHO this is not the right way to go; I don't buy a media player to install my own music player software...

Regards

Maybe you don't but there are many people out there that tweak there device to fit there needs
Adding extra features etc...

Hello,
I'd also be very interested in getting mpd running and playing music from the POHD (either over an external USB soundcard or preferably over one of the audio-outs of the device itself. I am not interested in streaming music from the POHD to other devices.).
Did anybody ever manage to do so?

Is this also working on a HD Mini 2 ??

Hey Everyone,

Yesterday I tried to get mpd running with help of above tutorial, but like others I failed at selecting a functional audio-output in the mpd config file. The only thing that seemed to work is a http stream as output and that is not what I want.

What do I want? Well, I am really fond of the android app MPDroid. This app is a frontend to mpd and works like a charm: whenever you are on the same network as a mpd-server (and you configured the app), you can seamlessly control the music, check out what song is playing, adjust volume etc. Just from your smart phone, which makes it (imho) the best remote control for a music player.

For this to work, you need (preferably) a Linux server with mpd running. At home, I have a desktop with Win7 which is not meant for media playback and I have a Playon!HD, which is completely suitable for the job! It's hooked up to my stereo anyway for watching movies.
So, getting mpd to run is really easy using the optware, making it output sound to the audio connectors on the back of the POHD or though the hdmi connection seemed hard (and still impossible) to me.

The problem I found is that the POHD does not seem to have a soundcard presented by the system. Checking /sys/class shows that no sound-type devices are available, same with other tools. Also, the modules included in the system do not provide soundcard type devices.

I guess, and I found this out after a few hours, that all control / mediastreams to the Realtek chip are done only by the main program (I believe Dvdplayer) and no native possibility exists to access the sounddevice / graphics-out directly. From this idea, I have three questions:

1) How is sound generated in the POHD? If this is build into Dvdplayer, how is it done, can we do it our self to create a more direct access to the chip?

2) Can we control Dvdplayer to passthrough audio / video generated by another program, such as mpd? This would entail a sort of dvdplayer-wrapper, but dvdplayer has to support this and this must be possible from the cli.

3) Is it possible to let the main program (assumed to be Dvdplayer) be controlled by the cli in such a way that it will play a http mp3 stream? If so, this would provide a workaround for the mpd problem: let mpd output to a local stream and let Dvdplayer play it. I expect this solution to lag a little, but is better than nothing!

I hope this makes a fine first post and I hope you guys have some ideas on this as well!
Btw, great forum! A lot of tweaking and adding possibilities is done here!

Tried to stream audio into mplayer to play it directly, but that doesn't work. Also no luck using DvdPlayer in a similar way. In fact I have not found any info about how to access the audio system of the Realtek chip somewhat directly.

On the other hand, metafeeds is able to stream audio and video from the internet. So can we modify metafeeds to play audio streamed from mpd instead of the Internet? Something like "switching POHD to mpd mode" by selecting a special entry in metafeeds which receives data from mpd via mplayer -dumpfile instead of the Internet?

It seems that all interfacing for audio / video is baked into Dvdplayer (via the proprietary Realtek SDK) and that, for now, the only options to tweak are files external to Dvdplayer. This last route indeed gives us the possibility to tweak the layout and also to include webstreams as shown by the Playon!HD X firmware. As it should not matter whether the streaming sever is shoutcast.com or localhost, this might work.

MPD has the possibility to stream the audio (also in conjunction with ICEcast server) to a http stream. Would be cool if we can control Dvdplayer to automatically select the localhost stream when MPD starts to play a song. Maybe we can do this by simulating the mouse / keyboard.

Indeed, with the PlayOn!X firmware it is quite easy to configure an RSS menu entry for the locally generated MPD HTTP stream, which finally plays the output directly on the player. In principle. But as soon as the HTTP stream is read, either locally via this RSS menu entry or via a remote VLC, the MPD process starts to use 100% CPU and seems to bring the player to its knees. The result is that the music "plays" for a fraction of a second every few minutes. Unusable. I've tried to tune the CPU usage in various ways without success. One can find similar reports from embedded devices without FPU with suggestions that this may be caused by floating point conversions needed to re-encode the audio.

My appreciation to you for telling this helpful information, I was penetrating this, thanks lots.