[mythtv-users] Large-scale myth farm

[Rob Willett]

Illtud,

Whoops, sorry about confusing the UK government with the Welsh. 

Quoting Illtud Daniel <illtud.daniel at llgc.org.uk>:

> Rob Willett wrote:
> 
> > Intersting to see a UK government org taking an interest in MythTV.
> 
> ...Welsh government org, if you please! We're doing this on
> behalf of the National Screen & Sound Archive of Wales, who have
> agreements with broadcasters about recording reference copies of
> broadcast material pertaining to Wales.
> 
> >>>UK DVB cards/receivers - which would you recommend?
> 
> > I persoanlly use the Nebula DVB card, though other people report
>  > success with the Avermedia 771 card.
> 
> Nebula have some linux pages on their website - can people
> confirm that they're linux friendly?

They are not very Linux friendly contrary to what many people have said. I have
requested informaion a few time and got precisely zero response. After saying
that the cards to work though.

> 
> > You can setup the system to record the EPG information provided by the DVB
> > stream. This works pretty well, though only has a week in advance. I've
> never
> > used Subtitiles so can't say if they work.
> 
> Anybody out there with experience of DVB subtitle capture on mythtv?
> Does mythtv only do 'live' subtitle decoding from the stream as it
> plays, or does it capture the subtitles to somewhere else (SMIL?
> MPEG7?).
> 
> > Mythtv does not support FM radio nor does it easily support DVB radio e.g.
> BBC 7
> > without a patch. This is because there is no video send with the audio.
> This is
> > a majot pain in the butt and I wish they would change MythTv to properly
> support
> > Radio.
> 
> We'll need audio-only capture, either from an internal tuner or
> a simple audio-in. We currently have an audio digitization
> application, so it's not essential that we build this into Myth,
> but it'd make sense to have it all in one. The BBC (I think
> we very rarely record non-BBC radio) have some radio listings
> on: http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/feeds/tvradio/
There is the option of replicating the BBC website feed. This wouldn't be that
difficult. Since MythTV doesn't easily support FM then this might be your own
option.

> 
> > Since there are 30 or so channels you wou would need around 5-7 servers
> > depending on the hardware specs.
> 
> We'd only be recording some programmes. We've enough experience of
> enterprise systems to build a resilient backend (though we'd have
> to look at how we'd do failover on the master backend - the SPoF
> of the system). How many quad opterons (Sun do the nice v40z)
> would it take to transcode say four programmes simultaneously?
> Could one server handle 4 DVB capture cards? What's the first
> bottleneck people hit - the PCI bus? hard drive speed?

If you're only recording some programmes then you can clearly reduce the costs
and setup needed as the number of BE servers reduce. No idea how many transcode
streams a quad opteron would handle. Send me one of the new Sun's and I'll let
you know <grin>. You may not need a lot of horse power though as you can
transcode in your out of hours time.  You can have more than one DVB capture
card and simply record that to disk. The bottlenext here would be data from DVB
card to the disk. I suspect the PCI (X?) bus would easily handle the data. get
lot's of fast disk.

Rob.

> 
> -- 
> Illtud Daniel                                 illtud.daniel at llgc.org.uk
> Uwch Ddadansoddwr Systemau                       Senior Systems Analyst
> Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru                  National Library of Wales
> Yn siarad drosof fy hun, nid LlGC   -  Speaking personally, not for NLW
> 
> 




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