[mythtv] Thoughts on encoder farms / distributed capturing and viewing

[Isaac Richards]

On Sunday 03 November 2002 03:56 pm, rob wrote:
> How about something simple, like a mythbackend and a mythfrontend?  The
> backend will take care of the recording from the video capture card,
> encoding, etc.  The frontend does the GUI, decoding, etc.  The frontend
> machine can even be a thin client, since the files, etc will be stored
> on the backend machine.  I haven't looked at the code yet, but I can't
> imagine that it would that difficult, since I think everything is in
> different threads anyway.  Create some simple TCP server on the backend
> that will send the recorded data when requested and the frontend can
> have a little buffer to handle network hiccups...  If I find the time
> this week, I might play with this.
>
> (I have a personal motivation for this, since I have two machines that
> cannot handle 640x480 record and playback simultaneously with mpeg4.
>  Both are capable of one function full-resolution, but I would want both
> functions at that resolution at the same time.)

That's pretty much the method I was planning on -- just making one of the 
backend boxes the 'master' and able to coordinate multiple other backend 
boxes, if the user feels like setting them up.

Isaac