[mythtv] Hosting questions...

[ralf]

Folks,

i am new to this list, but not new to open source itself: great
work with the MythTV, just amazing, how much work you have pulled
together!

now my question, please bump me to the right list, if I am wrong here.

i showed my uncle my brand new mythTV recording station in the 
living room and he turned around and gave me work :-)

he owns an apparmenent complex in Frankfurt, Germany where 12 different
people rented an (quite expensive) appartment. He supplies the whole
complex with a 2 MBit leased line, which is part of the rent.

Now he wants to offer his renters a digital video recorder and I was
keen enough to tell him: I can code it!

Well :-) big mouth, big mail....

Is it basically possible to have 12 DVB cards controlled from one source?
I am quite good with PHP and Linux and as far I can see from the docs,
it should be possible to setup 4 boxes with 3 DVB cards each, connected to
a NFS storage and let the people login and record their stuff.

Before I start to dig further, I just wanted to have assurance from this
list:

Is it possible to offer 12 different users simultanous recordings on 12
different channels? (I will be smart enough to recognize duplicate
schedules)

And secondly: 2 MBit is not a very thick line, if you talk GIGABYTES...

I saw during config the input values for a Win32 encoding lib. Would it be
possible to encode the stuff on-the-fly (realtime) into a higher compression
like MPEG4 or wmv to save 50-60% of space?

Any hints before I stumble into the unknown are welcome!

Thanks,
Ralf