[mythtv-users] Slave Backend requirements

[Raymond Wagner]

On Aug 20, 2013, at 19:39, Tyler T <tylernt at gmail.com> wrote:

> Slave backends made sense back when one PC couldn't handle more than a
> one, maybe two tuners (dumb framegrabber capture cards, software
> encoding). Now that modern tuners present pre-compressed bits and PCs
> are vastly more powerful, there doesn't seem to be a need for
> low-power slaves. Just hang a dozen tuners off one master BE.

You would be hard pressed to find a machine that could actually handle a dozen USB tuners.

> The only remaining reason I can think of to have a slave is to help
> with commflagging or transcoding... which... is not what low-power
> system is good at.

If you have no tuners, you should not be running a backend.  The jobqueue can be handled by mythjobqueue.  Additional Video Library storage can be handled by mythmediaserver.  There was a guy on the IRC channel several months back interested in putting together a slave backend for his custom ARM board with a pair of integrated DVB-S tuners, but it was decided that since he already had a vtuner interface running on it, there would be no advantage in running a slave backend locally, versus just accessing the tuners remotely through the vtuner driver.