[mythtv] Re: Recording Process

[Michael Cook]

>> I read his post as wanting to separate the capture and encoding
process,
>> which hasn't been discussed much.  Not the same as the separation of
>> front end (playback) and backend (capture+encode).
>
>It hasn't been discussed much because the network equipment and
CPU/memory
>resources required to do this makes it impossible or wasteful even for
>modern systems.
>
>--
> - mdz

I have been thinking about that. I realize that the files would be huge
when uncompressed and to do this "live" would be impossible without
bonding a couple of gigabit Ethernet cards, but I figured that I'd just
use small resolutions or maybe just slight compression and have it all
done "later". My idea was to have it move the files around at night.
I'll mostly be using MythTV for recording things, not watching live TV.
So I thought it could record them, and at night the files would be moved
to another computer (with more power) which would compress them better
(maybe MP4) and then they would get moved back over to the MythTV box.
Since it's just my home network, no one will care if I transfer a large
amount of stuff at night. The basic idea is like so:

1. MythTV records stuff onto it's local hard drive
2. At night (or maybe when it sees the network is "empty", which is
often in a house) the files would be transferred over to the more
powerful computer
3. Either a daemon or a cronjob or something on the other computer would
notice unprocessed files in it's "inbox", and start compressing them
4. When each file is done being compressed (or maybe when they're all
done) they would either be kept there and accessed over the network
(should work for highly compressed things) or moved back to the MythTV
box

An interesting side effect of making this an option to MythTV would be
that the other box could do other things than just compress things for
you. For example, you could probably rig it up (rather easily) to have
it so choosing an option in the list of files that are currently
available would copy the file to another computer, and have it burned to
a VCD or a DVD or something. Sort of an instant hard copy.

I'm just sorta thinking about all this at this point. I agree that this
would not be easy to code up, etc.