[mythtv] dynamic transcoding / multiple simultaneous quality levels

[Paul B. Henson]

I've been lurking on the list for a while, and given the impending idiocy
of the broadcast flag, am planning to buy a few HDTV tuner cards within the
next couple of months and put together a Myth box.

However, I do not yet have an HDTV, and even when I do, will most likely
have other TV's in the household I would occasionally like to use.

Unfortunately, the current requirement for a fairly heavy-duty system to
decode HDTV means that front ends connected to standard televisions will be
comparatively expensive as well as ruling out some very interesting
possible front ends (such as the Mac Mini).

One possibility would be to automatically transcode the HDTV recording into
a lower resolution version that a lighter front and could display on a
standard television. This would not be acceptable for an implementation
that actually had an HDTV though.

I was wondering as to the possibility of either dynamically transcoding in
real-time an HDTV stream on a backend server (presumably a beefy one) and
feeding it to a lightweight front end for display, or implementing the
ability to have multiple copies of a given program in different qualities.

I kind of like the latter better, it would require more space, but
presumably a system intended to record HDTV would have a lot of space, and
the transcoded version would only be a fraction of the size of the original
so I don't think it would be a problem to maintain both.

This would allow you to record a program in HD, and enjoy that full
high-quality while viewing on an actual HDTV, but also allow you to view
the program on a standard television using a cheaper and less powerful
front end.

I have not had the time to review the internal structure of the MythTV
code, so am not sure whether this would be extremely difficult or fairly
trivial to implement.

I was hoping one of the more experienced developers could possibly comment
on the feasibility/desirability of such a mechanism, and maybe even inspire
one of them to implement it ;)?

Thanks much...


-- 
Paul B. Henson  |  (909) 979-6361  |  http://www.csupomona.edu/~henson/
Operating Systems and Network Analyst  |  henson at csupomona.edu
California State Polytechnic University  |  Pomona CA 91768