[mythtv-users] Multi-card setup with only two cards allowed to record

[Joseph A. Caputo]

On Friday 28 October 2005 8:09, we4 at uakron.edu wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
>     I've been looking around and can't seem to find the info i'm 
>     looking for so 
> maybe someone can help. I have a server setup with the mythtv backend 
> and have 
> 2 pvr-250 cards in it; I also have two separate frontend units each 
> with a 
> wintv-go card in them. What i want to do is to have recordings only 
> occur on 
> the two pvr-250 cards in the server, I want the two cards in the 
> frontends to 
> be used as a local tuner for that frontend only. Does that make sense? 
> The 
> reasoning behind this is because if the cards in the frontends start 
> recording 
> then the frontend becomes really slow and sometimes locks-up. So i 
> only want 
> the cards in the server to do the recording, and the cards in the 
> frontends for 
> tv viewing only for that specific frontend. Is this possible? Thanks 
> in advance 
> for any help you guys could offer!

It sounds like the frontends are not beefy enough to handle software 
encoding even for recording, so LiveTV using the cards in the frontend 
is probably out of the question as well.

However, if you're willing to give up the ability to time-shift live TV, 
and can live without an EPG, then you could use the frontend tuner 
cards as simple frame-grabbers and watch TV using xawtv (or any other 
TV viewing program, like tvtime).  To do this, Myth doesn't need to 
know anything about the cards, so you need to remove their 
configuration with mythtv-setup.  Then, all you need is to re-configure 
the menu item for "Watch TV" to launch xawtv instead of using Myth; 
this is done by editing the XML file for the menu.  The "EXEC" command 
is what you want. (Someone may tell you to use "EXECTV", but that's 
only necessary if Myth is configured to use the card for recording as 
well.)  Of course, you may have to make some adjustments to 
your .lircrc, etc.

-JAC