[mythtv] distributed master/slaves configuration questions

[Michael J. Hammel]

First off, hats off to the developers.  MythTV is not only relatively
easy to set up (if you use apt for most packages), its also, as far as
I've seen so far, rather well designed.  There seems to be a good future
for MythTV because it can be tweaked to fit in many different
environments.

I've got MythTV running in a HP de100c with an added WinTV PVR 250.  It
took about a day to get it running (not including down time from a poor
cable internet provider).  In general it works rather nicely, though
there are some long term stability issues.  More on that in a minute.

I'd like to set this box up as a MythTV master backend server and then
set up a series of MiniMyth slaves throughout the house (in the long
term I'll have to migrate to a much bigger server, but this box will do
for now).  My goal is to have the slaves tell the server when to record
and what to feed to the slave - including live TV if possible.  I have
some questions on if/how this might be done.

1. I take it that slaves require a slave backend configured and that it
is the backends that talk to one another to get the master to feed the
slave the video/audio.  The frontend only talks to the local backend. 
Is this a correct view of the architecture?  As long as the master
backend is running (the master frontend does not have to be running),
recordings requested by slaves will be made and LiveTV can be fed to
slaves.  Correct?

2. The documentation suggests that part of the slave backend does not
need to be run but it isn't clear on if a TV input (re: a TV or PVR
card) is required.  Can a slave run without a hardware TV input directly
in the slave system?

3. Can a slave with a TV card be configured to watch LiveTV directly
from that card (without recording features)?  The reason this might be
desirable is if the lag in a local network makes watching recorded
LiveTV distracting then the user could switch to a more direct feed.

4. What does a master do (and what does the slave front end show) when
no video input sources are available for either recording or live TV?

5. Can slaves access all of MythTVs add-ons via the master - for
example, can games be fed to the slave to be run on the slave hardware
and can photos (re: MythGallery) be viewed on the slave if they are
stored on the server?  I know in the latter case you could set up NFS
mounts, but I was wondering if there was a mechanism (either by design
or already coded) that allows feeding the images via TCP to the slave
for display?  This would be preferable to reduce admin overhead on the
slaves.  

6. Do recordings get streamed to the slaves or do the slaves have to
pick them up via NFS mount points?  If the former, what protocol is
being used for streaming?  RTSP?  Something simpler?

I've got a couple of bugs to report.  Two are minor although I do need
to track down a serious problem with stability when LiveTV is left
running for extended periods.  This might be an ivtv problem, though the
backend is segfaulting too.  Is there a Bugzilla location for MythTV?  I
couldn't find a reference to one on the web site.  Also, if I make
changes to the code, what is the proper way to submit them?  I don't
know that I will make any changes yet, but I'm kinda expecting I will.

Thanks.
-- 
Michael J. Hammel <mythtv at graphics-muse.com>