[mythtv-users] Home Media Network Advice. Help! :-)

[PAUL WILLIAMSON]

>>> chickenbig76 at yahoo.com 09/27/05 8:40 AM >>>
> My new house will be completed in a month, so I 
> am starting to plan for a home media network 
> that I'd like to put together. I already have 1 
> coax and 2 CAT5e drops in each bedroom, the 
> family room and home office.

Good planning.  This is pretty much what I have.
There are a few places where I wanted 1 more cat5e, 
but I've figured out ways around it (more later...)

> What I'd like to do is have a central media server 
> in the basement, and client media adapters 
> (players) in other rooms. What would be great 
> is if the clients could schedule recordings 
> independently but share each other's streams, 
> along with DVD backups hosted on the central 
> server.

MythTV can certainly do this.  You'll need at 
least a PC in every place you want to view 
content independently.  You could also get a 
channel injector and have a central frontend 
to be viewed on a specific channel of your 
internal coax feed.

I'm trying to do a combination...central 
feed for security cameras and frontend 
in each room for independent viewing.  
It gets a little complicated because I'm 
injecting the camera-only frontend into 
a channel that all the other frontends 
can see.

> Is this something that is easily handled by 
> MythTV? Is it pretty easy to set up multiple 
> clients and a single server?

Simple? Yes.  Also it can get expensive.

> As a noob in this area, I'm sure there is a lot 
> that has already been posted on this topic, 
> but I don't know the best search terms to 
> separate the fluff from the gems. Hopefully 
> some of you long timers can point the way.

Start slow.  Do you have a cable/satellite box?
If so, how many?  I have a friend who has 
4 satellite tuners, all stacked connected to 
his backend.  He's also got one cable box 
with an HD firewire feed.  Then he has frontends 
all over his house and has a slave backend with 
an HD3000 for OTA HD broadcasts.  He's 
always watching something and it seems like 
he's recorded everything remotely interesting 
on TV.  I think he's got about 5tb of disks filled 
up.  Amazing that his 10% free (recommended 
for XFS) is 500gb - more than most people have 
on their backends in total!

> E.g. what are good video cards to use, a good 
> site for building reasonably priced clients, 
> gotchas in putting the network together, setting 
> up IR with cable boxes, what can TiVo do that 
> Myth can't, etc...

Tivo can provide a box that is plug and play.  Myth
is still a tinkerer's dream.  You'll get tons of 
opinions on cards, I find the Hauppauge 
pvr-150/250/500 to be the best and easiest 
to deal with.  They offload CPU work to the 
pvr card, leaving your pc cpu free to do other 
jobs.  I've seen custom client builds on the 
pvr database (pvrhw.goldfish.org) has 
some pretty good examples.

Jarod's guide under Tips 'n' Tricks has 
some good pointers on various items, 
not specifically related to the overall use 
of his guide.  Check out mythtv.info for 
Wiki entries.  nVidia seems to have the 
best linux support, and specifically 
a fanless card is what you are looking for, 
regardless of vendor or maker.

Good luck.  

Paul