[mythtv-users] VMWare and MythTV

[Joseph A. Caputo]

On Wednesday 08 February 2006 13:48, Ross Campbell wrote:
> > 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.

One more tip:  try using an NFS mount for your Myth recordings instead 
of relying on the backend to stream them.  There have been reports that 
the backend streaming has significantly increased overhead compared to 
the frontend playing directly from a file over NFS.

-JAC