[mythtv-users] Will Myth do this?

[William Munson]

Kevin Robbins wrote:
> Iam looking to build the ultimate home media server/pvr. A few things have been a little vague and I wanted to ask here. 
>
> The backend will be in the basement, it will have 4 twinhan DBV-S pci cards allowing for 4 recordings at once. HD storage will be done with 4 terabyte sata HD's.  2 TB raids. 
>
> There will be 3 remote frontends locally in my house.  Which will all be done with Gigabit switches, actual built in GB lan cards and cat-6 cable. 
>
> That part I have pretty much confirmed will work. (Any comments??)
>
> What I would like to know is.....
>
> 1. Will mythweb allow remote viewing over the internet in a browser somewhat like a slingbox?
>   
Yes however for security reasons you should avoid allowing access from 
outside your intranet unless you absolutely need it. Of course if you 
are an expert on securing apache servers then let the world in....  :)

> 2.  Will I be able to schedule recordings, delete recordings from a mythtv frontend? This is my likely set up based on research. 
> My frontend of choice will be a P3 900 MHZ with 100% passive cooling and a 1 gig "flash" hard drive for actual local booting but no local media storage (all that's done on backend) and a DVD-RW drive.  Software will be mythbuntu. 
>
> 3. Can I control the frontends Solely with a remote control? Or do I need a keyboard?
>
> 4. Dvd ripping. Let's say I go one of my mythtv frontends. And load a dvd. Can I rip it to the server from there? Can I burn a copy of it once its ripped on another frontend machine. 
>   
AFAIK you can only burn dvd's on remote frontends when running the 
development code (SVN). With the release code you are limited to burning 
on the backend machine. I may be outdated on this as I seldom burn disks 
anymore, only ripping.
> 5. Will I be able to burn a music playlist to a cd from a frontend machine?
>   
Again I think its only burnable on the backend machine but I may be out 
of date here too.
> 6. Will it be reliable??
>   
Reliable is a relative term. I find that I have to restart the frontend 
once in a while or it becomes unresponsive after a few days. I just 
created a script to restart the frontend whenever it dies and then kill 
it once a night from a cron job. Once I did that its had uptimes of 
months. Be sure to put the backend on a UPS to avoid trashing databases 
and recording on power glitches.