MythTV supports handling phone calls via SIP (and video as well). One of the features is that displays the caller ID information for the incoming call on the TV screen. While I didn’t want to use MythTV to actually handle the call, I did want the ability to see the caller id. Then if so inclined, I could reach over and answer the phone. So, the question became: How do I get MythTV to display caller id but not be a phone? Answer: Tweak Asterisk!
I use the TrixBox asterisk distribution as our home phone system (PBX). What I needed was to have it handle the call, but get the info to MythTV as well. So I created an extension for the Myth box and got Myth registered with Asterisk. I then created a call group in which our home phones and myth are all members. Then all I did was set Myth to not autoanswer, and increased the delay before going to voicemail to be greater than the timeout on the call group. So Myth won’t handle the call unless it sees it for > 30 seconds. But the asterisk server routes the call to voicemail if nobody answers in 25 seconds. This way myth has the _option_ to answer the call, and gets the caller id info, but asterisk still maintains control of the call!! 
At some point it would be cool to use festival to text-to-speech the CID info. I believe MisterHouse can support this.
1 response so far ↓
1 Juan // Aug 18, 2007 at 12:46 pm
Flite might be a better way to go as it is now the default text to speech engine in Trixbox. Plus, the speech sounds less robotic than festival.
Cool trick with MythTv though.
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