[mythtv-users] MythTV Secondary FE/BE Setup Advice

[James Crow]

On Tue, 2008-09-02 at 07:48 -0700, Allen Edwards wrote:
> 
> 
> On Tue, Sep 2, 2008 at 5:31 AM, James Crow <james at ultratans.com>
> wrote:
>         After having Myth running for the better part of two years on
>         one TV I
>         have purchased a second Myth box for the other TV in the
>         house. I am
>         debating making it a secondary BE/FE or just using it as a FE.
>         My
>         current BE/FE machine can only hold two drives (2x 500GB
>         SATA). One
>         drive is for recordings and one drive is OS and other media
>         files (DVD
>         rips, flac audio, etc).
>         
>         The new system came with a 500GB SATA drive. Plenty of room
>         for OS
>         install, but how do I best utilize the space? I don't watch
>         much TV so I
>         don't need it for TV recording space. I would like to use the
>         space for
>         storing DVD rips and flac audio. So far I have not found the
>         right
>         documentation to tell me how/if space local to a secondary
>         backend can
>         be used within Myth. In the documentation it mentions setting
>         the
>         storage directories per BE, but I think that only applies to
>         TV
>         recording space. I tried to run the video manager on the slave
>         BE and it
>         wanted to remove the video files stored on the master BE.
>         
>         Ideally I would prefer to keep all recording duties on the
>         master BE so
>         that the slave BE can be powered off except as needed for
>         watching
>         TV/movies. Is there a way to have more media files available
>         to a slave
>         BE without causing problems for the master BE?
>         
>         BTW these are both Mythbuntu 8.04.1 systems if it matters.
>         
>         Thanks,
>         James
>         
>         ____
> 
> I have a frontend only machine and, while it has a button to import
> DVD, it won't do it.  It is missing the transcode engine, which is
> part of the backend.  So rule that option out.  I assume you would
> also need a database to log the rips as well.  I have not tried it,
> but a frontend-secondary backend souds like something to try.
> 
> Allen
> 
> 
Thanks for the reply Allen, but I don't need to import/rip DVDs from the
Myth box. I use my main desktop and DVDFab with Wine (seems most newer
DVDs are "copy protected" and somewhat unreadable by Linux) to do the
rips.

Another way to pose the question is this:

What functionality, apart from recording TV, do I loose by making a
machine a FE only without a slave BE on it?

One more possibility is using nfs and keeping the flac audio on one
machine and the dvd rips on another. The only downside is that both
would need to be at certain times even though only TV was actually being
watched.

Perhaps it is time for a NAS server to store all my media and
concentrate my HD storage space.

Thanks,
James