[mythtv-users] Duplicate screens

Stroller linux.luser at myrealbox.com
Sun Jan 14 00:57:05 UTC 2007


On 14 Jan 2007, at 00:16, Brad DerManouelian wrote:
> On Jan 13, 2007, at 4:06 PM, Matthew Asplund wrote:
>> ... How hard would it be to tei two front end systems together
>> so that they both play the same thing.  It would be great if I
>> could make one front end a slave to another front end so that I can
>> play the same [thing] on both systems,
>> so that I can do the dishes or make a snack in the kitchen and not
>> miss the fun.  I suppose that I could use VNC, but that seens
>> pretty crude.
>
> You're not going to get video with VNC at any sort of watchable rate.

What he said.

> Seriously, are you using this for SD or HD? If it's HD, does that
> mean you're going to have a HD display in the kitchen as well?

Surely this is the same problem, whether or not the systems are  
"synchronised" or not.

If one has a good HD feed and two FEs, one HD, the other SD, one  
naturally wishes to record in HD. Is the SD FE not able to scale the  
HD recording down to fit the SD screen? (horsepower not withstanding)

> You got a long video cable? :)
> ...
> If it's SD, you could use a wireless video transmitter. I bought one
> a while back and it did an ok job of sending movies from my computer
> in the basement to my TV in the livingroom. I would liken it to VHS
> quality. I think it was about $50. My cordless phone would make it to
> wonky so I ended up running Svideo and stereo cables between the
> rooms - until I got mythtv, I mean. :)

Until you got mythtv - exactly! These are all valid solutions, but  
they're not very "Mythy".

The ideal way to meet Mr Asplund's requirement is surely to have the  
BE stream the feed to both FEs at the same time. I guess this is not  
currently possible - with correct synchronisation as he requires -  
and is a "feature request". But I have no idea of the programming  
implications - does the Myth protocol currently use UDP? According to  
Wikipedia (see the depth of my knowledge!?) "compared to TCP, UDP is  
required for broadcast (send to all on local network) and multicast  
(send to all subscribers)." I think that having both FEs request the  
same program from the BE at the same time over TCP would result in a  
slight loss of synchronisation; this might not be noticeable if the  
back-end can pump out data fast enough, but might result in jitter if  
the hard-disk is unable to keep up.

Stroller.




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