[mythtv-users] live tv over network?

[Dan Boger]

On Mon, Jun 07, 2004 at 05:52:47PM -0700, David Huseby wrote:
> -] Absolutly, no problem.  One note - I believe anything other 
> -] than TV is done on the frontend - Games, Music, Video, etc.
> 
> That's what I figured. So the playback of recorded shows, music,
> and ripped DVD's is all done via file access over the network (NFS,
> SMB, etc)?

With the exception of Live and recorded TV, which can also be streamed
from the backend even if the frontend doesn't have access to the actual
file.

> -] Not sure why you need multiple back ends for this - you can have
> -] multiple capture cards in one backend - especially if they're
> -] hardware encoders.
> 
> I thought the PCI bus/IDE bus would have a hard time keeping up with
> the data...I figured that two hardware encoders was about all I was
> going to get out of the hardware. Anybody successfully run 4 PCI
> hardware MPEG2 encoders in the same back end?

I've heard of people running 4 at a time - I think you should be able to
find references in the archives.

> -] Should be fine - I get two frontends off an NFS server over 100BaseT
> -] hub.
> 
> Anybody know what the main bottle neck is in the MythTV system? It
> seems to me that with gigabit ethernet that the bottleneck would be
> the HDD's in the server. I'm eventually going to want to run 5-6 front
> ends on my network.

My guess would be somewhere in the IO system.  A good hardware RAID
array should help, but at some point, setting up a slave backend might
be required, just to even the load.

> -] Not sure about the EPG - or how trasparent is it to switch 
> -] between the sources.
> 
> It seems to me like the logical solution is to number the *logical*
> inputs and then you could describe a channel like 1.4, 1.372, 2.9.1
> where the first number is the logical input number and the number
> after the decimal is the channel. By logical input I mean video
> source. For instance I plan to have two DirecTV receivers and one
> terrestrial HDTV receiver. That would equal two logical inputs, one
> for DirecTV channels and the other for the terrestrial HDTV channels.
> MythTV would then have to resolve recording conflicts amongst the
> logical inputs because for instance I can record two shows at once
> from my first logical input, but I can only record one show at a time
> from my second logical input. With this setup, the guide could present
> the channels from the logical inputs one after the other with
> different background colors. It would also be nice to allow
> interleaving of channels in different logical inputs so that I could
> see that my local sports team is playing and it is available in normal
> TV from DirecTV but it is also available in HDTV from my other logical
> input. <shrug> I thought I'd throw out the idea.

Wouldn't that confuse the scheduler, in case the same channel (and
therefor programs) are available on multiple tuners?

Dan