[mythtv-users] Choices to make...

[Matt Perry]

On Wednesday 20 August 2003 12:49 pm, Chad Vogelsong wrote:
> NOTE:  This is a long message from a 5 year Linux veteran but newbie to
> MythTV.
>
>
> Basically, I want to know if anybody runs their MythTV from a 100 Mbps
> storage backend.  Do you have a Tuner card in your storage backend?  I
> know about the frontend / backend / distributed nature of MythTV.  I'm
> just trying to figure out how to use it.  The way I see it, I have a few
> choices.


I have a tuner in my backend/frontend box.  It's an AthlonXP 1900+ with 512MB 
ram and 320GB storage, connected via 100Mbps.

In it I have a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR250 to do all my recording, and watch video 
straight from that box on 3 of my local PCs with very little hassle.

My network does ~11MB/s transfer, and my TV recordings are ~1.5MB/s, so there 
isn't much of a problem there.  3 of these streams would produce ~6MB/s.  I 
would say central storage point is best, and if you run into network problems 
consider upgrading to gigabit.


>
> 1. If there is no serious lag over the network, put a Tuner into primary
> storage server and use it as the mythbackend.  Use this card as #3.  Put
> a small hard drive & tuner cards #1 & #2 into the mythfrontend box.
> Mount the video storage space via NFS.  Let the Windows machine view the
> content via SMB.
>
> What about watching Live TV?  Does the signal go straight from the
> Tuner, gets encoded / decoded and then displayed?  Or does it need to
> write the stream to disk somewhere in that process?


As for the PVR250, it doesn't need to write the MPEG2 stream to disk (eg you 
can access it via /dev/video0, rather than a place on disk where the stream 
is captured).


>
>
>
> Since I need to get the right hardware before playing with the software,
> all I can go from is what I've read from others.  Is there a way to use
> multiple storage places for already-downloaded movies / mp3's / recorded
> tv shows / paused live tv / DVD backups / etc.?
>

SMBMount or NFS.


It really shouldn't be too hard, and I don't see much purpose in having 
frontend boxes storing stuff.  Maybe a LiveTV buffer, but even that shouldn't 
surpass 1GB (1GB ~= 15 minutes).  As for where to dump your recordings, you 
could always use a NFS or SMB-mounted share.

In the end, it's pretty much up to you where you want your rippers.  You could 
put them all in the backend machine and then stream live video out via the 
network to your client boxes, or you could put them in the boxes and have 
them dump their caps to your fileserver.  The second way will be better for 
your network as live TV doesn't even touch the network, but will be more of a 
hassle to configure scheduled programs and whatnot (even then it's still 
pretty easy).

	- Matt