I’m using Xine as the preferred video player on my MythTV frontend, because it has a nice video output driver called “xxmc”. This driver enables hardware accelerated playback of mpeg1/2 streams (e.g. ivtv recordings or DVDs) on Geforce 7xxx and other Geforce chips. The driver should fall back to the xv driver if the stream is in another format than mpeg1/2, but somehow the xxmc drives screws up playback of videos encoded with Xvid as playback gets really jerky.

My MythTV frontend depends on the masterbackend to be up and running, mainly because some partitions are nfs mounted. So I created a simple script to check if the backend is responding to ping: