Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Shared calendar for MythTV?

It became apparent today that we need some sort of shared family calendar. And I'm not talking about the paper kind on a wall. Both Rachele and I keep track of everything in our PocketPCs, synced to Outlook on our computers. Of course, I'd prefer to use something besides Outlook, but until I find a good substitute that syncs properly with my PPC, I'm stuck.

The problem is that Judy needs to know what is going on in the family. I need to know what days Rachele is working. She needs to know what appointments I have during the day. We all need to know when our soccer games are, when Nick goes to Taekwondo, when Anna has soccer practice, and when Julz goes to soccer tots. In order for Judy to be able to prepare appropriate dinners (like not a really big meal at 5PM when we have a game at 6PM), take kids to things, and so forth, she needs this information.

So today I was looking into ways to share our calendars. I certainly want to stay away from more Microsoft products, so an Exchange server is out of the picture. Ideally, when I get a MythTV backend up and running, there would be a plugin for it that would enable us to view our calendars on any TV or computer in the house. But I couldn't find any such plugin available.

So I started researching shared calendar solutions. Tons of stuff out there, and I barely touched the surface. Most of it just won't do what I want to do. But I did find some things of interest.

There is an application under development called Chandler. It uses a WebDAV server to store calendar data. They mention something called CalDAV. Need to look into this more. They also mention that Mozilla's Calendar and Sunbird products use WebDAV/CalDAV. Sunbird is a standalone calendaring app that goes along with Firefox and Thunderbird, while Calendar is a plugin for Firefox and Thunderbird. Both Chandler and Sunbird are a long way off from being useful to me. Sunbird doesn't even have syncing capabilities yet. But they certainly could prove to be an Outlook replacement down the road.

http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Projects/ChandlerHome

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/

Chandler has some related products. First, there is Cosmo. It is a sharing server that is based on WebDAV, but is "smarter". Second is Scooby, a web front-end client application for a calendar server.

http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Projects/CosmoHome

http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Projects/ScoobyHome

Now, the trick would be to develop a plugin for MythTV that would be a front-end client application that works with a Cosmo server. I googled for anything related to a calendar in MythTV, but came up with very little. Perhaps there is something out there and I just don't know about it. I think I'll post to one of the MythTV mailing lists and see if anyone has any thoughts.

2 comments:

  1. Hi, Have you found anyhing for Mythtv and calendar? BR Mats [email protected]

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  2. Hi,
    Did you get anywhere with this?
    I have a davical server running on my mythtv backend, just wondering about how to impliment a frontend for it as a mythtv plugin...
    Nate

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