[mythtv] Record on den machine; play on other machines.

[Bruce Markey]

Isaac Richards wrote:
> On Wednesday 27 November 2002 10:15 am, Michael Kedl wrote:
> 
>>Is there already a set of instructions to allow recording to happen on
>>one machine and playback to work on N others?  Even a "live" show?
> 
> 
> I'm working on this -- my local tree is completely broken right now because of 
> it =).  You'll designate one box as the master, and everything will connect 
> to that on startup (even the frontend running on the same machine).

Isaac, I'm thrilled to hear that you're already working on
this. The configuration I'm anticipating is to have a box
in my living room, one on the TV in my bedroom and two
computers in my computer room. All have or will soon have
tuner cards and use 100Mb ethernet. I'd like to have one
database and scheduler for all of the tuners and be able to
watch any recording at any location. This is the absolute
top of my wishlist. I was thinking I'd hack at this myself
but I'd rather pass on my thoughts to you if you are already
working on this.

Since you support two tuners on one machine, it shouldn't
be too hard to support tuners on multiple systems. Conflict
resolution doesn't seem to be any more complex since it's
just a matter of choosing the two or three preferred shows
rather than just one (given enough tuners, there would never
be any conflicts to resolve ;-). If the hostname is included
in the 'capturecard' table, it should be easy for each myth
instance to record the shows scheduled for the tuner(s) on
it's own machine. I assume writing to a local disk would
work best and that the 'recorded' table could have a field
for the hostname where the recording resides. Is this
generally what you'll be doing?

Remote playback could be as simple as NFS mounts but periods
of latency could make the playback choppy and rewind would
cause the same data to be resent. I've always thought that
it might work better if requesting a remote file triggered a
copy to a local disk (either the same file name in the local
RecordFilePrefix dir or a tmp file) then the player opens the
local file. This way all the data crosses the network once
ASAP unaffected by the viewer pausing or rewinding.

Judging by the way everything works thus far on MythTV, I
trust that however you go about it, you will do everything
in a reasonable way.

--  bjm