[mythtv-users] A clustered PVR just rocks...

[jedi at mishnet.org]

> On Jan 18, 2008 8:44 AM, Steve Smith <st3v3.sm1th at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On 18/01/2008, Chris Hayes <chris at lwcdial.net> wrote:
>>
>> >
>> > >     Between my desktop, my frontend, and my backend I've got 5
>> > > cpus distributed over the home network catching up on the backlog.
>> > >
>> > >     That's just too cool...
>> >
>> >
>> > Ummm, how?
>> >
>> > I had to transcode two HD shows last night and it took *forever*.  I
>> > sat there working on my laptop that was doing nothing at all and
>> > wondered whether I could use it for any good?

    Generally speaking, the first step is to setup your target machine
as a remote frontend. Most of the pre-requistites for a slave backend
are the same as for a frontend. This includes things like remote mysql
access and the codec libraries needed to deal with recordings and
transcoded recordings.

     Once you've got a remote frontend setup, then you need to be
able to setup your recordings directory for read/write access on
the your target machine. This is just straight NFS stuff.

     Once your target box is good to go as a remote frontend, and
you've got rw access to your recordings directory then you run
mythtv-setup to setup things like your IP address, where recordings
are stored and how many transcoding and commflagging jobs you want
to allow.

      A slave backend won't speed up any particular batch job. If
your HD transcodes move at 10fps, more backends won't speed that
up. It will however allow you to do more transcodes at once as you
start to build a backlog from the HD transcode taking so long.

>> >
>> >
>> > Is there a howto or more information on how to do something like this
> for us mere mortals? I googled mythcutprojectx but only found the source,
> and to be honest I'm not smart enough to figure out what's going on
> without
> a little handholding.
>
> My home network right now is 1 myth FE/BE, one FC6 fileserver, One Windows
> domain controller / fileserver, my Core2Duo Vista workstation and a couple
> other Windows PCs. It would be awesome if I could distribute the CPU load
> across some of these machines.

Dunno if you can do anything with the Windows machines without dual
booting them or running some sort of virtualization software (vmware).

The Fedora box might be promising though.