[mythtv-users] Setting up slave backend system

[Greg Woods]

On Mon, 2005-09-19 at 20:02 -0400, Scot L. Harris wrote:

> I expected to see the SBE capture cards defined in the MBE system in the
> status page or in the setup on the MBE.

You don't see them in mythtv-setup, as that only defines
locally-connected capture cards. You SHOULD see them in MythWeb. I found
MythWeb very easy to set up, and it shows you things (like this) that
are difficult or impossible to find any other way. It's worth having.
MythWeb also increases the WAF since she can now schedule recordings
from her Mac.

This means you have to run mythtv-setup on the machine that has the card
to set up capture cards. I found this very confusing too but I finally
figured this out. My slave backend now works fine. mythtv-setup on the
SBE only shows the one card that is on that machine, yet I can use all
three cards including the two in the MBE just fine. Going into MythWeb
will show all three cards, and properly indicate when the SBE is down
("not currently connected"). The reason this is confusing, I think, is
that clearly mythtv-setup is manipulating some information that is
stored only on the local host, and some that is stored in the database,
and nowhere is it documented when this line is crossed, I just had to
figure it out by trial and error. Video sources are defined in the
database, do not try to set those up separately on the SBE. But capture
cards are defined locally, you must set those up with mythtv-setup on
each machine that has one or more cards. If you have a machine that is
ONLY a frontend (no capture cards), then all you really need is the
mysql.txt file so that it can find the MBE, and you may never need to
run mythtv-setup at all (correct or not?).

--Greg