[mythtv-users] VMWare and MythTV

[Ross Campbell]

> I have a VMware box which is pretty much a mirror or my backend,
> without the capture cards of course.  I managed to run video fine on
> it, but I was running over WiFi and it was jumpy.  I wasn't sure if
> that was the WiFi to blame or the slow processing due to the
> virtualisation.


The number of people who have reported great success with mythfrontend over
Wireless is small, so I'd blame wirelss, not VMWare.

Here is advice I offer to people trying to run wireless frontends who
*refuse* to run an ethernet cable to said machine:
- don't waste your time with anything slower than 802.11g
- make sure your wireless driver is *WELL SUPPORTED*
- make sure your signal strength is *EXCELLENT*
- reduce your recording quality settings *WAY DOWN* so that recordings and
livetv use less than 1gb/hour
- adjust time stretch down until stuttering stops to help you figure out how
much more you need to reduce recording quality for regular playback (or get
used to watching recordings veerryy sllooww)
- transcode your recordings to lower quality and bitrate before you attempt
to watch them over wireless
- use MythStreamTV to stream low(er) quality bitrate streams to a wireless
machine and just use any old media player
- after much frustration... give up and run an ethernet cable.

Other than that... vmware for mythtv *frontends* should work just fine (and
potentially would work for backend and capture cards, but the place where I
could see doing that would be using VMWare ESX and some array of servers to
provide myth*backend* server fault tolerance, but that's probably a
discussion for another thread, and wouldn't be low cost).

Using vmware to boot a knoppix frontend (or ubuntu, or whatever) on a laptop
or other PC seems like a good idea for an impromptu frontend that won't
require shutting down and rebooting, nor forcing a family member to ween
themselves from Windows prematurely.


-Ross
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