[mythtv-users] On the Road - Remote Frontend

[DISAFAN]

I've looked through the mailing list logs and read a few discussions of 
a similar nature, but wanted feedback on this problem I'm having.

I maintain a MythTV system in my home consisting of a variety of tuners 
and misc HD components. My relatives have a vacation home a few hours 
away I often visit on weekends. There is basic cable in analog there, so 
I took my extra analog cards I used to use in my original system and 
some old computer components and built a combined BE/FE there. It has 
created several issues.

1. When I'm coming up, I want to log onto the system remotely...which I 
can do, and setup the program schedule I have on my primary to record 
there, so I can watch the programs locally. I haven't thought of a good 
automatic way to do this. How do I tell a system to copy only the 
schedule for a certain time period to another system? Especially when 
the instructions for many recording schedules are Record at Any Time on 
Channel ___?

Since analog cable is basic, and thus I'm missing many channels I 
normally get, I often bring programs by exporting them to an external 
hard drive and carrying them along. Not a problem there, but....


2. I'm afraid that analog will get a shutdown there any month now, and 
I've added a cheap digital tuner, which will allow it to keep broadcast 
stations(no broadcast reception up here though). I'm looking for 
thoughts on transferring the shows over the net to the remote system. If 
the program aired while I'm away, there is no way to verify a commercial 
flag, so I can't save  space by cutting commercials, because I might 
lose a piece of the show. That creates several questions.
    a. What is the best compression setting/codec I should use in this 
case? Many of these things are HD, and I don't have that kind of 
bandwidth, alas. A 74mb file takes 20-30 minutes to transfer.
   b. How can I best automate this? I don't need every program 
transferred. I'd like to set it up as a user job on the home system, 
where I can specify for any recording to run the job, which will 
transcode the episode into an ultra-compressed format while keeping the 
HD original for the home computer, and schedule it for uploading to the 
remote system, perhaps using a cron job. And then a second cron job on 
the remote that adds it to the remote database.

I'd welcome some real-life stories of people who may have done similar 
projects, or how you might suggest I implement such a system. I also 
have to fiddle with wakeup settings to make this work, because the 
system is programming to shut itself down while setting the next 
recording time, as I don't live there, there may be days in between 
recordings.