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

[Robert Kulagowski]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Isaac, do you have thoughts on how you're going to proceed?  I've
been thinking of "nice to have" features.  Stream of thought stuff
here...

o  Self-organizing encoder farms.  Every 30 seconds, mythtv sends out
a broadcast packet to the local LAN that has information in it like: 
hostname, disk space free, number of encoder cards and encoder card
type (or source, in case something like DirecTV is only available on
one encoder).  This allows cooperative scheduling.  The other way is
to simply do what Cisco's IP/TV does:  at startup, the server
enumerates the encoder cards and the existing content and sends a
message back to the Content Manager.  The Content Manager then
changes the status of the server to "Managed" and maintains a table. 
The server and the content manager have to be manually configured to
make them aware of each other.

o  A machine that doesn't have any encoder cards is still valuable,
either as a transcode machine, or as a disk space repository /
archive server.

o  Totally decoupling the encoder and the viewer.  Therefore, a local
node that has an encoder _might not_ be using it to watch live TV;
its "live" channel may actually be coming from a different encoder on
a different node.  The ringbuffer file is getting filled using IP.

o  A master scheduler is always looking a few minutes into the
future.  If a program is supposed to be recorded, use the "free
encoder card" broadcast messages to determine which node should do
the recording, and the free space message to determine if we need to
purge content.  If you use a master/slave relationship rather than a
cooperative one, then this might not be as big an issue, since
presumably the master will always know the status of each encoder
card.

o  A "stripe" based conflict resolution scheme.  I'm not sure that
I'll be able to explain this, but I'll try.  One of the things that I
don't like about my Tivo is the following:  "Everybody Loves Raymond"
runs on CBS from 1900 to 1930 in Chicago.  Sometimes, due to clock
issues, or the network being a little late, we miss the last bit of
"zinger" before the final credit roll.  So I tell Tivo to go 2
minutes long, and so now it records from 1900 to 1932.  The problem
is that if there's a show on a different channel starting at 1930, it
won't get recorded at all, because the Tivo isn't allocating smaller
blocks.  So even if I'm willing to miss the initial credits on a
show, I'm out of luck.  My thinking is that if you split a show into
1 minute blocks and overlap based on priority, the 32 minute show
will overlap the first two minutes of the show on the other channel. 
Every minute, the encoder is checking to master schedule to see what
channel it should be recording, so it will naturally "fall off" the
end of the 32 minute show and onto the 28 minute one.  This scheme
also handles "early start", since a higher priority show will overlap
the end of a lower priority show.  Of course, if there are multiple
encoder cards that are free then there's no conflict.

o  Partial deletes.  I know that you mentioned commercial cutting,
but I'm interested in "delete up to this point".  Say I have a 2 hour
recording, and I've already watched 1 hour of it.  I want to free up
the disk space by deleting the first hour.

o  A "hint" system for shows that are on multiple times per day.  On
my Tivo, if I tell it to record "The Daily Show", it's going to
record it 4 times a day because lately, TMS hasn't been putting in
show descriptions, so the Tivo doesn't know that the showing at 1400
and 1900 is a rebroadcast of the previous days' 2200 broadcast.  When
I do a manual record by time, I have to go in and delete the Friday
"Comedy Central Presents" which is on at the same time because I
can't program the Tivo to record M-Th.

o  Configurable "history".  Keep track of shows that were recorded,
and when they were deleted.  That way, if I'm going to watch an
episode of a show and I don't remember if I've seen the OSD can tell
me, either at time of recording or in the "To Do" list.  The Tivo has
a 28 day memory on this sort of stuff, but most syndicated shows take
longer to cycle through than that.  Allow the user to specify how
long until purge.  Disk space is fairly cheap.  Note:  this probably
won't work unless we get the episode descriptions instead of just the
show name.

How's that for a wish list?  Can you get all of that in before 0.7?
:)



-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGPfreeware 7.0.3 for non-commercial use <http://www.pgp.com>

iQA/AwUBPcABXPc1NpCTlP0JEQK46ACguCX9LhiIkgXQZE/0hLmkAvYAzSEAoM2a
EwJLfyqBBIoYmAxf0Wu2KO8S
=hX7H
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----