[mythtv-users] Synchronising frontends

[Greg Oliver]

On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 2:39 PM, E. Westbrook
<mythtv-users at westbrook.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 04:05, Richard Morton <richard.e.morton at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Synchronising audio between mutliple playback is notoriously difficult.
>
> Extremely so, and video too.  It might be possible to use RTSP for this, but
> RTSP or its equivalent and MythTV have never met, to my knowledge, and
> they'd have to become fast friends (perhaps even lovers, lol) for anything
> like this to work.  There are gstreamer libraries for RTSP, but gstreamer
> coding is also not for the timid.
>
> I've dreamed of this myself in anticipation of my Super Bowl party in
> February (with monitors and TVs of different resolution and form factor all
> over the house, each with a frontend, all synchronized and controlled by me
> via android phone on the patio), but quickly determined that I would have to
> spend way more time engineering it than it's worth.
>
> $0.02,
> EW


I remember this exact topic last year about this time  :)

Since then, someone posted a nice link to multicat thought:

http://ivoire.dinauz.org/blog/index.php?post/2010/09/02/Multicat

A combination of that and a cleverly crafted vlc external player using
a single file on each frontend could pull it off using the vlc
multicast player.  You really would not even need multicat if you did
not want to use mythbackend to stream it - though that would kind of
defeat the purpose and gui ease of mythtv.  One of the FEs would have
to be used to initiate the stream though.  A *headless* BE would
prolly do the job just fine with an exported display somewhere though.

Of course I have not tried any of this, but in theory it should all
work.  This assumes mythtv's external player requires no feedback to
mythtv until it finishes since no video would obviously be playing on
the initiating system.  It may be far easier to initiate something
like this with a slightly modified mythweb now that I think about it.
I'll try both as I use mythweb infrequently.

I'll try to cook something up since this is interesting although I
doubt I would ever use it - I'll post back.

-Greg