[mythtv-users] Proposed future power saving networked configuration (0.22 in mind)

[Guillaume Membré]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 07:00,  <glenhawk at optusnet.com.au> wrote:
> I thought I would share some thoughts that I have had about the future of MythTV Systems, maybe stimulate some discussion.
> New PCs, especially low-power (and cheap) systems often have only one expansion slot (PCI or PCIe) so this got me thinking about how to handle multiple tuners in future systems while keeping power consumption as low as possible.
> 0.22 is rumored to bring about the dynamic waking and sleeping of slave backends. With this in mind you could have a Master-Backend with only one tuner (or even none if you need the slot for something else) and lots of storage and then every other system could be a combined frontend/slave-backend systems.
> When the system needs another tuner it looks to see if someone has a FE/SBE running (someone watching TV) and either uses it's tuner or wakes another FE/SBE. The FE/SBE systems would record to the HDDs in the Master Backend server because while this may take a lot of network resources (with a gigabit network there shouldn't be a problem) it would mean that you would only ever need the Master running to watch recorded TV on any of the FE/SBE systems.
> To take this one step further the master backend could also be on a low powered system (something like an Eee-box perhaps) with the storage assigned to a NAS (Network Attached Storage).
> I imagine that this could save some additional power with the added advantage of having the NAS available (even when the master backend is powered off) to other networked PCs for shared files such as video, music and even documents.
> I would have to look into the performance of NAS systems and whether multiple systems can access them at the same time but it seems like a viable option.
> Add to this features like VDPAU and low powered, distributed systems could be the future of MythTV.
> PS: one other benefit I was thinking about was that although the systems on their own wouldn't be too powerful the fact that you would commonly need more than one system running would mean the processing would be distributed, spreading the load.

Hello

I'm already running this kind of setup in 0.21 : my master backend is
a via c2 running at 533 Mhz with 256 Mb of ram and lots of disk. It
runs 24/7 a master backend, mysql, lighthttpd, mythweb, mediatomb,
nfs... this master doesn't have any tuner configured in. My slave
backend has 2 tuners and wakes up and shutdowns on demand. I patched
my slave backend to handle this behaviour (ticket #5210). It runs
flawless for about a year. My differents frontends connect to the
master backend at any time and I had no issue with this low powered
master backend.

Hope this helps :)