[mythtv-users] New system configuration

[Christopher Kerr]

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 6:46 PM, Kaare Rasmussen <kaare at jasonic.dk> wrote:
> Hi
>
> I want to set up a system with one central box and several distributed points.
>
> The central box might very well be based on
> - 1 ASRock Nettop ION 330 HTBD
> - 1 E30 Combo Plus DVB-T/C
>
> So far so good.

No, not really - the Ion boxes don't make very good backends -
recording DVB streams is generally fine (provided you use a desktop
drive, not a smaller, slower laptop drive), but tasks like commercial
flagging will be very slow.

>My real questions are related to the distributed stations. Can
> Mythtv handle this? I need
>
> - Several televisions in separate rooms, each their own channel selector

Easy - one Ion based client for each TV.

For each frontend to be able to watch a different channel, you'll need
roughly as many tuners as you have frontends, since each tuner can
only tune one mux at once. (You may be able to get away with slightly
fewer tuners - see
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/record_multiple_channels_from_one_multiplex
)

In practice, though, you'll find that you're watching less and less
Live TV as you get used to using MythTV, so you only need as many
tuners as programs you want to record simultaneously. Many users find
that 2 is sufficient.

> - Several music outlets, both from (internet) radio and stored CD's
> - Not necessarily at the same location; possibility to route signals

MythMusic is currently pretty clunky, but the possibility exists to
launch a different player from the MythTV menus. I'd second the
suggestion of using the Squeezebox software, with SqueezePlay (
http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/SqueezePlay ) on the clients.
This solution is pretty cool - you can manage playback from a web
browser on another computer, and have different frontends playing
different content, or synchronised to play the same content.

- Chris