<div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 8:35 AM, Danie Brink <<a href="mailto:danie.brink@gmail.com">danie.brink@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">Hi,<br><br>I've been using MythTV at home for a while & it works great. I've just been asked to come up with something similar for an apartment complex. Anyone ever tried running a BE under Xen/VMWare? I need (for a start) 20 separate BE systems and ideally want to avoid getting 20 physical machines (I'd have to start dangling boxes out the little server room's window).<br>
<br>I was thinking of putting 5 virtual servers on each server (Dual Xeon 3GHz QC machines with 12GB RAM each & a PVR-250 or Plextor TV402U dedicated to each virtual machine). The servers have tons of storage so I'm not too concerned about transcoding, just recording & playing back pre-encoded video files (MPEG2 & DivX) & serving up photos & mp3s.</blockquote>
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<div>I think if I was doing this, I'd go more with a number of backend machines needed to record all the content you wanted (say a pack of PVR-500 loaded into PCI slots or a series of HD Homeruns). Then layer on top of that some kind of UPnP server (Myth's server is coming along but other products like Twonky Media Server seem to work better with clients). Then you can provide simple frontends like the Popcorn Hour or people could bring their own UPnP like a PC or even a PS3. This avoids all the problems of having to deal with Myth not being designed for multi-user environments (disabling scheduling, deletes, etc) and gives the end user some flexibility in clients while still retaining Myth's power on the backend for scheduling and managing recordings.</div>
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<div>Kevin</div></div>