[mythtv-users] live tv over network?

Larry Matter mythtv2 at matter.net
Tue Jun 8 00:45:50 EDT 2004


> -] Absolutly, no problem.  One note - I believe anything other
> -] than TV is done on the frontend - Games, Music, Video, etc.
>
> That's what I figured.  So the playback of recorded shows, music, and
> ripped DVD's is all done via file access over the network (NFS, SMB,
> etc)?

Playback of recorded shows *can* be over NFS, but by default it is a
homebrew streaming protocol.  All the other stuff has to be (NFS/SMB/etc)
mounted to the frontend.

> -] Not sure why you need multiple back ends for this - you can have
> -] multiple capture cards in one backend - especially if they're
> hardware
> -] encoders.
>
> I thought the PCI bus/IDE bus would have a hard time keeping up with the
> data...I figured that two hardware encoders was about all I was going to
> get out of the hardware.  Anybody successfully run 4 PCI hardware MPEG2
> encoders in the same back end?

Not quite, but see below.

> -] Should be fine - I get two frontends off an NFS server over 100BaseT
> -] hub.
>
> Anybody know what the main bottle neck is in the MythTV system?  It
> seems to me that with gigabit ethernet that the bottleneck would be the
> HDD's in the server.  I'm eventually going to want to run 5-6 front ends
> on my network.

Just to let you know what you can do, I recently ran a little stress test
on my setup.  I have 3 capture cards, 2 are PVR 250's, one is bttv.  I had
all three cards recording, and at the same time I played 4 different shows
(one was a recording in progress) on 4 seperate mini-itx frontends over my
switched 100Mb network.  No skipping at all. Then for grins I fired up
mythfrontend on the server for a fifth frontend.

The disk drives are 2 120G drives with XFS on striped LVM (on a seperate
IDE controller).  Not a single stutter and the recordings were fine.  The
MPEG2 recordings were 720x480 @5K.  A while ago I measured each (mpeg2)
stream at about 5Mb/s using ntop; a 100Mb network should handle a large
number of streams.

So, I don't think you have anything to worry about.

Larry


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