[mythtv-users] Output to h.264

[mike at grounded.net]

Brian, thanks so much, this is very helpful.

> At this point I would suggest setting up either a combo frontend/backend,
> or a standalone backend and a single frontend.
> This will allow you to become more familiar with Myth and what it can do,
> and the answers to some of your questions will become obvious.

Good suggestion. 

So basically, I would install, say my local TV/Cable tuner card as just one back end. 
I would do the same thing with say my DVB-S2 card and now would have two backends.

As I have not played with mythtv yet, I am getting the sense that the reason why my post is unclear is that when one builds a separate front and back end, the two need to talk together and A/V needs to stream between them. If this is right, then it means that mythtv already encodes to something which a UPnP device could pick up over the LAN.
 
> I'm not sure
> what type of STBs you have in mind, some of the DirectTV receivers will
> work as UPnP clients, as will devices such as the
> PopCorn Hour, Myka, D-Link DSM-520 and even XBox 360s. Some TV sets even
> have UPnP/DLNA clients built-in.

I don't have an STB in mind other than something inexpensive so that I can purchase multiples, hopefully, around the hundred dollar mark or so.

I do have a roku HD1000 which I cannot recall handles UPnP or not but also have an eGreat M31 I think it is, which I believe is also known as a Popcorn hour device which is UPnP. In fact, that device pops up on MS machines here and there now and then as an available resource.

I also have a couple of Enseo HD1000 I think they are called but those seem to need a proprietary front end though, when I got them, they sounded like they could be programmable.

We recently decided to give up our DTV service so I have a couple of HR10-250 units which will end up as museum pieces along with an old ReplayTV 5040 unit. I suspect these are useless from what I've read, since they will be inactive and have no DTV card in them.

Am I starting to get the picture?

> Any frontend machine you want to be able to use for HD playback will need
> either LOTS of CPU horsepower, or a VDPAU-
> capable video card, decoding HD is a non-trivial task best left to hardware

So for example, I have the workstation I mentioned, which currently has all of the cards installed which I mentioned. If I put those cards into backend's then all that will be left in there is the FX5200. That machine is a 2.8Ghz. I have multi-core systems but would prefer testing with this first. 

> The goal of a frontend is to have a (relatively) low power device
> to display video and control the backend.

Wonderful, I'm starting to form a plan of action thanks to everyone's input. Sorry about the confusion with the initial post but it's hard to describe what you're after when you're just starting out. I still have to get past the nvidia not wanting to display video from it's s-video port so that I can at least get some output going.

Mike