[mythtv-users] PCI-E Analog Card

[R. G. Newbury]

On 01/24/2010 09:21 PM, Brent Norris wrote:
> On 1/24/2010 7:55 PM, R. G. Newbury wrote:
>>
>> After learning something about what you are doing, the only question I
>> have is, why do you think you need 10 simultaneous recordings? I find it
>> hard to believe that there are 10 channels of educational programming
>> running at once.
>
> Well the first reason is that I believe the system that is being spec'ed
> by Vbrick has 10 "encoders". After that the main reason is that this
> system could end up being the primary way that people view television in
> our district. We have really moved away from televisions in our district
> and instead our primary viewing system is projectors now. As a result of
> the projectors not having builtin tuners we have people connecting VCRs
> to the projectors so they can tune channels from the cable. This is
> becoming a problem as there are fewer and fewer analog tuners being made
> and thus more and more tunerless VCRs.
>
> Vbrick solves this problem by making the web browser the means to
> watching content by encoding it and basically posting it to a Sharepoint
> system.
>
> I want to remove the VCR by putting the windows version of mythfrontend
> on the teachers desktops and sharing the videos on my own web pages.

OK I can understand this.

> All that is a complicated way of saying that I need to build enough
> tuners into this that if 10 people want to watch something, I am not
> going to run out of tuners for it. 10 tuners really only translates to 2
> tuners per school. I know there is a lot of chance that everyone will be
> watching the same content at once (presidential address, shuttle launch,
> etc) but I prefer to overbuild and no one use it than underbuild and
> have people complaining that they can't watch what they need to.

One aspect you may be misunderstanding, is that with Myth the *real* 
idea is that you do NOT watch live tv very often. You record what you 
want to want, and retrieve it later. Even 'Live-TV' is actually 
recorded, and then displayed. So *IF* a program is scheduled for 
recording, and recorded, the Front-end machines can each watch the same 
file....Your need for some hundreds of front-ends means some technical 
problems, which probably can be overcome. Getting waaay outside my 
knowledge limits here..I only run combined boxes! Maybe some form of 
multicast.
You mention Vbrick, which I deduce is the methodology which presents 
what would otherwise be an mpg stream presented by a Myth Frontend, into 
a Sharepoint entity. These words are 'not English' to me. This whole 
concept is at odds with the manner in which Myth works, although I must 
admit, serving up videos, a-la-youtube, in a browser may solve lots of 
technical issues. Depends upon the server capabilities I suspect.

> That brings me to another problem. Having installed the Windows Prebuilt
> and connected it to my personal mythtv setup, I am not getting any text
> on it. The frontend loads, but all of the text lines in the menu are
> blank/incorrectly rendered. Anyone ran across that before?

Yes. Generally when the mythtv theme will not work on the setup or 
resolution you have set up. Worst case, change the resolution of the 
desktop and restart myth then change the theme (Setup- Appearance in the 
linux version).
Another question then: what are you intending to use as the myth 
backend? And what are you using on your personal setup?

Geoff





          Tux says: "Be regular. Eat cron flakes."