[mythtv-users] small portable DVR

[Jay Harbeston (ISeePeople)]

> On Jan 13, 2019, at 7:27 AM, James Abernathy <jfabernathy at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> My main Mythtv backend is on my SAMBA/NFS NAS and is a Gen 3 Core i7 with 8.5TB of drives used in a RAID 1. Works fine and I'll leave it alone except to replace fails drives occasionally. Having the mirror on my drives has saved me at least once a year.
> 
> Now to my new issue. I want a small portable OTA DVR to take with me when traveling in an RV. Since the weather is cold and messy I've been building test systems of all types to see what works.
> 
> My 3 types of hardware are a Raspberry PI3 B+,  an old 3rd Gen Core i3 NUC and a Celeron 847 NUC.  All three would use external USB hard drives for the recording storage. The tuners would be HDHR.
> 
> The RPI3 is the best choice for size and power use, but I'm not sure about it as a combined FE/BE.  The Core i3 NUC is a good FE/BE if you use Kodi as I get tearing with mythtv-frontend. If I use either the RP3 or Celeron as a backend I could take my Nvidia Shield TV to use as a frontend, which is the way I'm leaning.
> 
> So my questions is if I use the RP3 as a backend what software do I use.  I've seen the wiki about Mythtv Light, but that is mostly about FE. Do I start with Light and add mysql stuff?  Do I build regular mythtv from source for the RP3?
> 
> I know the RP3 is more powerful than I originally imagined because I built a test system with Raspbian Stretch 9 and TVheadend as a quick and dirty DVR and it worked well as a backend.  I could record at least 2 HDTV programs while watching one of those time shifted.
> 

I found that I could not use a USB stick as the storage for running and instead used a class 10 128GB memory card for mythtv backend on rip 3b+.

You would then use another rip 3b+ as the frontend. That should do what you need. You may even be able to do the rpib+ frontend wirelessly due to improvements made in the 3b+. 

You will also need the mpeg2 license ONLY for the frontend if your broadcasts are mpg2.

For both Rpi3b+’s you would want to set the performance mode described in the mythtv raspberry pi page.

Regards,