In order to watch your recordings on your laptop when you're not on the network, you'll have to copy over the recorded file and store it on your laptop hard drive. I have this section in my /etc/samba/smb.conf file:

[recordings]
comment = Recordings
path = /recordings
writable = no


I can then go to a windows box on my home network and browse to \\mythtvserver\recordings and I see all the recorded show files. They are named cryptically; you might want to look at the program 'mythlink.pl' (should be in the directory /usr/share/doc/mythtv-docs-0.24/contrib/user_jobs/ on your mythbox). It will create human-readable symbolic links in a directory of your choice that symlink back to the actual recordings in your /recordings directory. So if you created those symlinks in, say, the directory /recordings_by_name, then you could share out /recordings_by_name through samba and access the files through that share from your windows devices (since samba will follow symlinks by default).

Once you can access the files remotely, copy over whatever files you want to a directory on your laptop, then tell xbmc on your laptop that you have videos in that directory and you want it to scan them into the library. As long as the naming convention of the video files matches what you'd find on thetvdb.com (which is where xbmc gets it's lookup information) the recordings should be successfully imported into your xbmc library. The format I use looks like this and works fine:

community_02x21_paradigms_of_human_memory.avi

For the show 'Community', season 02, episode 21.

Or, worst case scenario, you just go to the 'file browser' option in xbmc, browse to the video files, and play them directly from there.

Good luck!

I think I'm also stuck on the FQDN dns entry issue, I have a mythtv frontend that works fine when playing livetv from my backend machine.
But I get nothing but a hung XBMC when starting live tv, from that same frontend machine using xbmc.
Does an entry for myth://username:password@10.1.1.3/ need to be
myth://username:password@mythbackend/
with an host entry of 10.1.1.3 mythbackend.
both are from linux boxes and confused as the fully qualified domain part.
Where in your mythbackend/frontend does the fqdn get set?

Thanks if you can clear this up.
Cheers
Geoff

I’ll take a look at the Aeon skin and see what it would take to make that same modification. I also modded the PMIII skin, I’ll post that here as well.

I'll take a look at the Aeon skin and see what it would take to make that same modification. I also modded the PMIII skin, I'll post that here as well.

What happens when you hit the Guide?
I get a list of the channels, but selecting a channel locks up xbmc and makes it crash. Is it because there is too much information to load? I am running mythbackend and xbmc on the same machine.

It would also be nice to modify the Aeon skin in xbmc to display the plot information for tv shows.

Thanks again for the post.

Good luck!