The iphone is capable of playing low bandwith MPEG-4 and H.264 videos. This will probably require you to transcode your MythTV recordings. If your original recordings are playable on the iphone then you can ignore the VLC and web server settings.
mvpmc will allow you to initiate the transcoding of your MythTV recordings via VLC. It will then allow you to play them via a web server. Unfourtunately, the transcoding must complete before the recording will be watchable. Depending on your resources, this could take a very long time.
You need to provide the IP address or hostname of your master MythTV backend. You may also specify the port, if you are using a non-standard port number.
In order to initiate transcoding, you will need to provide the IP address or hostname where VLC is running. You also need to provide the pathname where the MythTV recordings are as well as the pathname where the transcoded files should be stored. These are the Source and Destination entries, respectively.
You will need to make sure that VLC is running with the telnet interface. This can be done by starting it with the vlc -I telnet command. You also need to ensure that your VLC setup is capable of encoding AAC audio. If it is not, you may need to upgrade your VLC installation (from Medibuntu, for example) or recompile from source.
In order to watch transcoded recordings, you will need to provide the base URL for the web server that will serve the files. The URL should be include the protocol, port number (if required), and path, such as http://192.168.1.1/mnt/mythtv/. The transcoded filename will be appendeded to the base URL.
The VLC transcoding will be done by appending .mp4 to the name of the recording and storing it in the VLC output path. If you wish to do this outside of mvpmc so that your recordings are always playable on the iphone, then you will need to name the transcoded files appropriately (ie, foo.nuv would become foo.nuv.mp4).
You can play, start a transcode, and stop a transcode, with the three buttons displayed below on the MythTV program view.
The MythTV backend, VLC server, and web server can be on three seperate systems. If this is the case, you need to make sure that the VLC server has access to the original recordings, and that the web server has access to the transcoded recordings.