[mythtv-users] Can MythTV do this?

[Mark Hetherington]

On Wed, 1 Feb 2006 03:17 am, James C. Dastrup wrote:
> >On Tue, 31 Jan 2006 06:36 am, James C. Dastrup wrote:
> >> Wow, sounds like a cool project.  But think of the limitations. Let's
> >> just pretend that there was a certain popular NFL game coming up, where
> >> most of the units will be watching it live.  You would need well over
> >> 200 tuners!
> >
> >Why can't they all just stream off the output of one tuner?
> >I don't think it's transparent, but I know you can certainly get two
> > machines watching from the one tuning (in mythtv 0.18) by hitting record
> > on the first one and the rest watch the recording, then fast forward to
> > where it is live.
>
> Because that would involve "training" the users to do that.  "I'm sorry,
> person in Apt 23C. If you wan't to watch TV, you're not supposed to
> press the button that says "Watch TV", silly!  You're supposed to
> go to Media Library, Watch Recordings, and select it from there!  Duh!"

Sorry, I didn't mean to say this was a solution ready to go, just that in this 
case a technical solution does exist: if the backend "automagically" recorded 
anything someone was viewing (Which i believe it does in SVN), and thus 
others can watch this recording at the same time. (i.e. you have 20 people 
streaming out the live tv buffer for the tuner on that channel). When one of 
these people goes to watch a different channel, the backend opens up an 
unused tuner for the new channel, and leaves the old one as it was so the 
people watching "the game" go on undisturbed.

For this kind of system having to have one tuner per person seems a bit 
inefficient on a larger scale, once you have more people than channels one 
tuner per channel should suffice. Free to air in Australia is really only 6 
channels over digital, so you could just have 3 of those dual tuners and 
capture everything on free to air.