[mythtv-users] Re:Multiple frontends watching the same backend program.

[Brad Templeton]

On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 06:33:53PM -0500, Isaac Richards wrote:
> On Wednesday 19 January 2005 05:43 pm, Brad Templeton wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 12:43:00PM -0500, Isaac Richards wrote:
> > > <discussion going in completely the wrong direction removed>
> > >
> > > http://www.mythtv.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=24
> > > (and ignore the dumb secondary comment)
> >
> > Actually, I think there is merit behind the secondary comment.
> 
> No, there's no merit there.  It's dumb to chunk things in sizes less than one 
> show long.  Breaks easy playback by other programs, takes longer to coalesce 
> them if you want to transcode, etc.

Indeed, it creates issues, and requires tools to understand.  The merit
lies in making livetv and recording as identical as possible.  The more
identical they are, the easier it is to implement things on top of
both.   This suggests, I would think, that you want to avoid things that
can happen in one but not in the other.   For example it makes conversion
from live to longterm trivial (just flipping some bits.)  It even allows
things like changes of quality inside a recording (which as you probably
know Tivo refuses to do when you try to convert a live tv session to
a permanent recording.)

No one part of me feels that live TV is an abberation you are supposed to
get over when you use a PVR and so it's not worth so much effort.  If it
weren't the first thing most people encounter, this would be even more
true.

I do see your point that the gains from chunking recordings might be
had other ways (though deletion of the first part of a recording
is probably hard any other way in a low-free-disk environment) though.

The goal though is you would not coalesce the chunks, that the transcoder
and commercial flagger would have to be aware of them just as the
player is.  (Not quite as much as they don't need to worry about real
time transitions.)

However, let this not distract from the main goal of some unification,
and hopefully the always-recording goal.