[mythtv-users] Streaming MythVideo the right way?

[Chris Ribe]

On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 10:35 PM, Eric Robinson <ryunokokoro at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Part of the attraction of a media center setup like MythTV is that not
> only do recordings become available throughout the network [home], but
> ostensibly other media does as well.  Lets say, for the purpose of argument,
> family DVDs.  Recorded Television plays back smoothly and manages jumps
> smoothly.  If I rip my family's summer vacation DVD as a VOB and try to play
> it back through MythTV, however, the playback gets choppy.  I assume that
> this is due to my use of a NFS mounted directory as the file source.
>
> I've read in other forums that NFS is not very good at handling large
> files accessed
> semi-randomly-and-otherwise-sequentially-but-in-parts-instead-of-whole-files
> [heh].  So what I'm curious to know is if there's a way to leverage the work
> that's gone into making TV-playback smooth for the Video files in MythVideo?
>
> Our current network consists of two Mac Minis wired over Gigabit Ethernet
> and one Mac Mini wireless'd over 802.11n running MythFrontend.app and a
> MythBuntu machine in the basement with four tuners (two HD, two SD).  The
> Backend has 3TB set up in RAID such that we could get our huge collection of
> family memories stored at full quality and backed up.  The thing is, even
> though we can watch HDTV recordings on any of the Frontends (and they're as
> smooth as butter), the DVDs running in SD choke and stutter a bit
> (especially after a skip-ahead which can sometimes cause playback to quit).
> Is there any way around this?
>
> Thoughts?
>

The goal of the MythTV project was to make all of your digital media
accessible through an integrated living room interface,  and in the early
years it absolutely achieved that goal better than any of the alternatives.
The heart and soul of MythTV has always been the PVR, though, and most of
the considerable development energy in recent years has gone into
maintaining MythTV's position as the best PVR money can buy.

To that end, MythTV heavily leverages the fact it is the "recorder" of the
PVR.  The backend decides what recordings are available, where they are
stored, and what format they are stored in.  It has access to structured
metadata about those recording before they are made.  To make things run
smoothly, though, it needs unrestricted access to your tuner devices and
recordings directories.

Mythbackend is the heart and soul of MythTV, and while the various myth
plugins share a frontend interface and access to a database with
Mythbackend, they are seperate entities that simply have not recieved as
much attention as the backend over the years.

As for specific suggestions, the answer to your problem is to get your
movies into the recordings directory/table and out of the MythVideo ghetto.
I believe there are tools available that will help you accomplish this, but
I'm afraid I can't offer any specifics.



-chris



-- 
Chris Ribe
TV/IT Engineer
WCJB-TV/DT Gainesville, FL
(352) 416 0648
cribe at wcjb.com
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