[mythtv] hello and question

[Raymond Wagner]

On 12/19/2012 12:10, Peter Hoopes wrote:
> Hello MythTv dev's,
>
> 	First, I wanted to thank you all for the work you do. I love where MythTV
> is going. We use it here at an independent school for capturing and
> distributing video to several classrooms, laptops, and for video storage.
> It works really well.
>
> 	I suspect this isn't the right forum, but I'm hoping one of you can point
> me in the right direction. I'd like to implement a number of MythTV
> Frontends across campus, but I would /really like/ to disable the RECORD
> option. Unlike a person's house where they would normally want that
> functionality at every station, I just want a host of playback (either
> live or recorded) stations, as I'm afraid we're going to overload our
> backend with recording by students (boarding school) and/or delete things.
>
> 	It is possible to have a Frontend with that option disabled? Again, I
> figure I'm not in the right place - any pointers to another mail list or
> developer would be great.

MythTV was never really designed with security against its users in 
mind. In order to record something, the frontend manually inserts a new 
recording rule into the database, and then sends a command to the 
backend using the internal protocol to perform a scheduling run. You 
could make a custom version of the frontend that rips out all the 
scheduling capability, but that wouldn't prevent anyone from building 
their own copy of MythTV and accessing it that way, or simply using the 
credentials in config.xml to poke the database directly.

The easiest solution may simply be to run two systems, one accessible 
and one isolated. Have the isolated system perform all the recordings, 
and throw together some scripts tied into the event system that clone 
the recordings over to the public system. The public system wouldn't 
actually do any recording, but would only use dummy tuners to make 
mythbackend happy, so should anyone screw with it, it would be trivial 
to recover.