[mythtv-users] Myth-web and large groups

[Brad Templeton]

On Mon, Jan 17, 2005 at 10:32:58PM -0500, David Escott wrote:
> I am considering a MythTV setup for a large group of people (large
> residence with two shared cable TV's is always touch and go). Any
> suggestions are helpful, but in particular I have two questions:
> 
> 1) How to arrange voting.
> 
> I do not intend for anyone to use the front end but rather for them to
> use myth-web to make their scheduling requests and then download the
> program from the box after it has been recorded.

Instead of voting, just tell people who want shows to volunteer to buy
another hard drive or tuner.  Now that support for the wintv-150 is
underway, and presumbly the 500, you can load up with tuners.   People
can keep stacking in 250gb external USB 2.0 hard drives until the cows
come home, too.

It seems that doing this would be far cheaper than the labour to
create a voting system and to make it secure.

Not that I am against the general idea of having user accounts in
a PVR system.  In particular, you would like it so that the system knows
that 2 people want to watch the show, so they _both_ have to delete it
to make it actually vanish from the system.  Or more than 2.  This is
useful even in families.

But security?  Right now myth has none and it would be a good chunk of work
to add it.  While mysql does include some facilities to control access
to tables and even columns to various users, this is not used.  The
myth database often runs with a default password in an openly readable
file, and there is just one password.   

(Of course deleting from the database does not delete program files stored
on disk but makes them inaccessible via myth)

But frankly, it seems odd to work in an environment with so little trust.

Of course, with my, as you probably know, everybody's computer in their
room would be a TV viewing platform, so the question of 2 cable TVs would
no longer be an issue.   I would be amazed if you needed more than 4
tuners because so many shows are on multiple times, and myth adapts to
that.

But I suppose if you were to dig into the database you might find a
pattern of permissions that would give you some mild security over the
database at least.   But a really secure system would probably depend
on the backend having a secret master password to let it do any changes
to the database, with users having passwords that allow only reading and
perhaps inserting rows in the appropriate tables.