[mythtv-users] Highest number of simultaneous streams recorded?

[Steve Adeff]

On Friday 14 October 2005 10:16, Brandon Beattie wrote:
>
> The current limitations on number of streams has to do with what
> hardware you choose to use.  This includes tuner cards, hard drives,
> network cards, and CPU.  I think it would still be rather easy to get
> 10+ streams recording and 4-5 being played back (1 local, 3-4 remote)
> before you see any problems.  To do this you would need either hardware
> assisted analog encoders, or an HD tuner because they won't use more than
> 3% or so CPU.  To reach a 10Rec 5Play number, you would want a good
> processor and memory, something 3.4Ghz or over would be fine -- If
> you're not going to watch video locally though, I bet you could do all
> this with 2Ghz or less.  Disk usage is the next issue.  Using raid
> 0, 5 or 10 would help in this areas you may be able to do 15 streams
> total with 2-3 striped drives I would bet.  Networking will be the final
> issue.  HD streams run up to just under 20Mb/s.  As much as we wish to
> get 1Gb/s speeds all the time, expecting much over 400Mb/s constant is
> not always possible.  Myth struggles to play video smoothly unless it
> feels like it has room to breath and almost no packet loss.


another option if you find yourself recording this much is to use LVM (logical 
volume manager). It would allow you to connect, say four 300gig drives and 
use them all as one AND stripe data across them (like RAID 0). Or you could 
use 3 striped and the 4th as a parity drive in case one dies. 
This would most definitely give you the drive speed required to not only 
record 4+ streams at once, but play back equally as many.


Steve