[mythtv-users] Taking MythTV on the road; neither SlingBox nor transcoding is ideal

[Yeechang Lee]

I'm going to be spending four or five weeks away from home, in Hong
Kong and New York, during the next few months. While I'm looking
forward to the experience, I'm of course loath to give up my luxurious
MythTV setup.

There's of course the possibility of transcoding programs down to
really, really small resolutions and bitrates and watching
them. Problems:

* No live video ("live" in this context meaning from the
MythTV box in real time, as opposed to actual "Live TV" broadcasts)
* Duplicate video files.
* Long transcode times.

I then considered the SlingBox, which posters have mentioned a few
times on the list. My video card has, in addition to the DVI output I
normally use, S-Video output, which I could easily plug into the
SlingBox. Unfortunately, there are problems here, too:

* Unsurprisingly, no support for a generic "MythTV remote" as there's
  no one standard model. However, there's also no ability for users to
  build support for a custom remote, either, whether in training the
  SlingBox's IR output or ibuilding a custom virtual remote diagram
  for use within the player.
* No OS X client; it won't be out until sometime during the third
  calendar quarter. There's a possibility I might get into the current
  beta program, but I wouldn't count on it. I could use the
  Windows-based client using Boot Camp or Parallels, but the former
  would be a major hassle and performance in the latter is unclear
  (but promising).

All this, of course, would be a moot point if the upload pipe from my
apartment and the download pipe to whichever hotel I stay in were as
wide as my home network. This way I could just run mythfrontend on my
MacBook. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The next-best scenario
would be for mythbackend to, like SlingBox, be able to transcode
resolutions and bitrates down on the fly. I realize this ability does
not exist, either.

Am I missing something really obvious here? (Besides "Forget about
MythTV and just enjoy being a tourist," which is a
perfectly-reasonable answer, except that no matter how many sights I
see there will be times I want to watch television from home.)

-- 
Yeechang Lee <ylee at pobox.com> | +1 650 776 7763 | San Francisco CA US