[mythtv-users] Moving Recordings to a dedicated Frontend

[Brad DerManouelian]

On Jun 18, 2008, at 5:45 AM, Jason Weida wrote:

> My setup is a single Backend on a desktop and a single dedicated  
> Frontend on a MacBook.  Is there a facility within MythTV to select  
> several shows stored on the backend and temporarily copy them to the  
> frontend?  It would be sweet to load up a few hours of shows on the  
> MacBook to watch on the plane or something.  I think I could copy  
> the files manually over, but I would like to be able to have my wife  
> do it, so a nice Myth interface would be superb.

Frontends by design do not hold media so there is nothing specifically  
built into myth to handle that use case, but of course there are ways  
around this. I use video2ipod.pl to transcode programs and put them  
into a video podcast which I then subscribe to via iTunes. I have it  
set to automatically update so whenever I plug in my iPhone I have a  
bunch of new programs on there I can watch whenever I want. You could  
do the same thing and even forego the transcoding part and just copy  
them if they are already in a format playable by something on your  
frontend machine (mplayer, vlc, etc.)

You could also NFS mount your frontend drive on your backend machine  
and use mythrename.pl --link to get human-readable names for your  
programs and manually copy them to the other location. However, keep  
in mind that your frontend will not run at all if it can't connect to  
a backend so you would not be able to use it like you can from home.  
You'll have to find some other way of playing the recordings (which is  
why I use the video podcast method I mentioned above. I can play them  
with my iphone or within iTunes).