[mythtv-users] Whole house Myth setup

[Troy Roberts]

I have had a single myth backend/frontend setup going for a few months 
now, and have figured out a lot about how the general architecture 
works.  I am now wanting to go to a full scale deployment, and am 
looking for some feedback.

The plan is to use myth everywhere in the house for watching video, 
slideshows, music, etc.  The environmment consists of TVs in siz 
different rooms - some are HD some are not.  My thinking is as follows:

- Use Xbox frontends for the locations that are not HD
- Use a frontend based on a small form factor PC with an nvidia FX5200 
card for location that are HD sets
- have one or more backends doing the various captures

Here is where I am looking for feedback / opinions:

- I am thinking about having one central file server with a bunch of 
disk using lvm and nfs mounting all the myth volumes so basically the 
backends doing the capture work would not have much disk in them at 
all.  Is this practical? the network infrastructure will all support 
gigabit ethernet so i think that bandwidth should not be an issue, and 
the server would have 4x SATA drives so I/O should also not be a problem

- most of the signals I want to capture would be coming from satellite, 
or digital cable boxes, is there an effective way for a single system to 
properly use multiple ir blasters to change those boxes, or would i need 
to have a separate backebd box for each ir-blaster based device i want 
to control? If one backend can properly switch channels, etc on multiple 
devices, is there a good howto somewhere on this?

- I am planning to use PVR-250 for the non HD capture, and pcHDTV3000 
for the HD streams - it is my understanding that you would need a fairly 
beefy box to capture more than 1 HD stream, but with the 250s onboard 
encoding, I think I could capture 1HD stream, and 1 or more non-hd 
streams at the same time.  IS that a bad assumption.

Any thoughts, suggestions, feedback on this would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Troy