[mythtv-users] Sync'ed frontends?

Mark Knecht markknecht at gmail.com
Fri May 6 15:25:10 UTC 2005


On 5/6/05, Devan Lippman <devan.lippman at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/6/05, Mark Knecht <markknecht at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 5/6/05, Mario Limonciello <mario.mailing at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Mark Knecht wrote:
> > >
> > > >Hi,
> > > >   Not sure if this is a question or a feature request. There are
> > > >times that it would be cool to have every TV in the house showing the
> > > >same recorded program at the same time. There are times we might want
> > > >to wander around but not lose track of what's going on - for instance
> > > >when watching some sports or news event, or when cleaning from room to
> > > >room. It would be cool to sort of subscribe to some local feed coming
> > > >off the backend and going to all frontends, or some set of frontends.
> > > >
> > > >   Is there a way to do this today? If not, do others find this idea
> > > >interesting?
> > > >
> > > >Cheers,
> > > >Mark
> >
> > People are in all rooms at the same time in this model. You're having
> > a party and watching something together. you have some recorded
> > program on in the living room and on the patio at the same time, etc.
> > People wander from room to room but do not miss the action.
> 
> What you're describing sounds like an RTP broadcast and its something
> thats being worked on (just audio for now) in mfd.  for now you could
> use an RF modulator in your house and set all the TVs to channel 3.
> Just make sure you stop it before it gets out to the street (just use
> a one way signal boost or something).  Of course this will make
> watching live TV difficult.

Sorry - I wasn't clear. Every TV is my house has or will have a MythTV
frontend. If it doesn't it's not part of this request.

In my mind I want a single networked stream to go from the backend to
all frontends that are participating. I use wireless hops between
wired nodes and don't want to send 5 copies of the same data and use
up too much bandwidth. I.e. - the living  room has the backend and one
front end. There's a jump to the router which ties via a wired network
into three more frontends, and maybe one more wireless hop to one or
two final frontends on a third wired group. I use switches on all my
wired networks between the nodes.

All mythfrontend's should (must?) be using ntpd and time sync'ed o the
same time server. mythbackend could broadcast some video (with a
forward timestamp if necessary) to ensure that all frontends display
it at the same time. (more or less)

One thing that seems a bit different is that this might be better
driven from the backend machine. Some GUI that shows the frontends on
the network, their IP addresses, what room they are in, etc., and a
little check box for each that allows the backend to send the data to
the correct machines.

I hope that clarifies a bit more of what I'm thinking about.

Cheers,
Mark


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