[mythtv-users] Can MythTV do this?

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 01:47:19PM -0600, Kevin Kuphal wrote:
> Perhaps.  I think the guys at one of the other PVR software places 
> recently blogged about an 11 tuner system using a combination of PVR-500 
> (2 tuner / PCI) and USB tuners.  With hardware encoding, you could 
> easily go above 4 tuners per backend.  I think your limitations come 
> more in the bandwidth writing to disk and serving the content out. 

Snapstream has built a 10-tuner chassis with 5 PVR-500's.  So the bus
bandwidth can be dealt with. Given the number of available analog
channels on most cable systems, you could tune all channels with 10-12
tuner chassis.  Be careful about cooling: Hardware-MPEG cards generate
a *lot* more air than you think.  But we're still at only half a rack,
so far.

> You can easily address the disk writing limitations by moving away from 
> local storage on the backend to something more SAN like using 
> FiberChannel. 

Yeah; Adaptec has the cards; Linux has the drivers. RAID, too, though
failures are less critical.

> I think you can also address the serving/network bandwidth by using 
> non-backend NFS servers to share the aforementioned storage.  While the 
> frontend does need to talk to the backend systems for things like 
> scheduling, etc., if it has local access to the files via NFS shares, it 
> will use that for distribution leaving the backends alone.

Split-horizon networking.  Both sides on Gig-E, with 24-port 100Base
switches to the units.

> I imagine part of the challenge of using Myth for this type of 
> environment will boil down more to the questions of security and how do 
> you prevent those 300 users from disabling other users scheduling rules, 
> deleting content, or otherwise mucking about.  The system isn't designed 
> for disparate users but more of a common househould...

Yeah, but defining the changes wouldn't be all that hard, I shouldn't
think.

No, the #1 problem will be licensing. You're not *just* a cable
company: you're *storing* the material in non-ephemeral copies, as an
agent of the end-user.  I doubt anyone has machinery in place to cope
with that.

Cheers
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
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	A: No.
	Q: Should I include quotations after my message body?