[mythtv-users] Virtual Tuners / Channels ?

Wed Apr 19 13:07:06 UTC 2006

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Thanks for the replies guys.

What I was hoping was to get away from the lots of masters / lots of
slaves (with lots of tuners) problem.

I was hoping that the "Set Top boxes" could be MythTV boxes with both a
frontend & a back-end together and then in the room where all the TV
cabling comes in I'd just have one or more PCs with a tuner card for
each channel (actually I was hoping I could be smarter with a multiple
channels from a DVB-S / DVB-C card with many channels from the one tuned
transponder so even less than one tuner per channel).

This way I would only have 1 tuner per channel streaming out to all
MythTV front/back ends in each room with each of them doing their thing.

It would be great to be able to offer the live TV pausing features, etc

Derek

PAUL WILLIAMSON wrote:
>>>> derek at rivertower.ie 04/19/06 8:23 AM >>>
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>> Hi Everyone,
>>
>> Would it be possible to use MythTV in a hotel type environment 
>> with one (or more) "media" servers that have real tuners - one 
>> tuner per channel - - and then have the MythTV boxes in every 
>> room with some kind of "Virtual Turner" that just gets the 
>> real-time stream from the streaming servers in the building?
> 
> Sure, anything is possible.  But the virtual tuner would not be 
> virtual, it would just be a tuner...
> 
>> I looked at "Myth Stream" as a solution but I don't think that 
>> it would incorporate in with the normal MythTV channels.
> 
> Right.  Read on!
> 
>> Maybe all I need to do is work out how to get a /dev/videoXX 
>> that is, eh sort-of somehow, NFS mounting the real remote 
>> video stream and then tell MythTV that that Video device is 
>> a tuner with only one channel tuned on it?
> 
> Simple - only have one channel defined in the database for 
> that tuner.
> 
>> I love MythTV and have been using it at home for a couple of 
>> years now but someone has been asking me about a big 
>> networked system with set-top boxes and I'm obviously 
>> thinking about MythTV for the job.
> 
> This has been discussed at length before.
> 
> What you want to do will involve lots of tuner cards, pretty much 
> a slave backend/frontend setup in every room, or a lot of 
> slave backends in one location and frontends in every room.
> 
> Depending on how you want to do it, it could be very difficult, 
> or very easy.  My setup is a very small one, but could 
> easily be expanded with just more slave backends.  I've now 
> got a total of 8 feeds coming into my system, and frontends 
> distributed in every bedroom (4), the kitchen, the family room, 
> the media room in my basement, my workroom in the 
> basement, a mobile one for plugging in to various points 
> outside when necessary and one in the garage.
> 
> The feeds I have are traditional cable wired straight into 
> a pvr500, one into a pvr250, two more into pvr150s, one 
> into a HD-3000, and two from firewire on DCT-6250s.
> That doesn't count the 4 cameras outside, only because 
> I haven't figured out how to integrate those without 
> a tuner card for each one yet.
> 
> I have two slave backends, the second is for the HD-3000 
> and the two firewire inputs.  If I want additional pvrx50s, 
> I have 4 more slots to expand in the backend.  When I need 
> more firewire, I'll need another backend, but I'll need 
> more DCT-6250s as well.  Adding a frontend is pretty simple, 
> but I haven't gotten them to netboot yet.  So upgrading 
> is a nightmare for 5 of them.  The others are mediamvps.
> We don't watch much live tv at all anymore, as I have just 
> about anything stored on disk.  Backing up is a problem too, 
> but I'm always looking for drives to add to the network.
> 
> The bottom line, is if you want each room to have the 
> individual ability to watch any channel, each one has to have a 
> tuner card dedicated to it for live tv.  If you only want to 
> offer content stored on the hard drives, that would 
> make the installation a whole lot easier (IMHO), and make 
> the costs a lot lower.
> 
> Paul
> 
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- --
Derek Conniffe
Rivertower Ltd
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