[mythtv-users] The Ultimate Myth Setup

Neil Davidson lists at backslash.co.uk
Sun Oct 24 20:19:54 UTC 2004


>>Each TV will need its own "frontend" system which will
>>handle decoding and playback.  Because the work is
>>distributed, having a dual-Xeon backend is probably
>>overkill.
>>
>
>Thats interesting.
>there is no way i can have the server do all the encoding and stream the
>mpg files over the network to make the clients as light as possible?
>(with a second or two delay obv...)

The server is doing all the encoding, but if you use cards like the PVR-250
then they will be encoding to MPEG-2 in hardware so all the backend is doing
is running the database and either storing or serving video from disk. With
only two cards a dual Xeon would be overkill.

Where it gets hard work for the server is during transcoding to another
format (say MPEG-4 for reduced archive space etc) or for commercial
flagging. The front ends can be a little as an Epia M6000 i believe, but an
M10000 would probably be better. Have you looked at MiniMyth
(http://www.linpvr.org) for front end ideas? even if you don't use MiniMyth
there is some very good info on the forum there. Diskless, network booting,
low power, zero noise frontends are what you should go for in my opinion :)




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