[mythtv-users] simultaneous viewing

[Mark Lord]

On 12-04-13 03:03 AM, Nick Rout wrote:
..
> I am struggling to see the use case here. Sure, I once had a house
> full of people round to watch a rugby game, more people than were
> comfortable in one room so half watched in each lounge room. Other
> than that type of situation (which was Live anyway and is easier
> outside myth), what really is the benefit?
..

I don't need it here, but I have visited homes of many people
where they have 3-4 TV sets always "on" (wasteful, yes)
and tuned to the same program (Live TV).

So when they move about the house from room to room,
there is full continuity in the sound and video from each set.
For people like that, accustomed to Live TV, having their PVR
sync all of the displays is a no-brainer.  For the user, at least.

In MythTV this could be done as a totally frontend thing.
The way I would do it, is like this:

-- each frontend MUST use NTP with the exact same time servers
to synchronize to a common clock.

-- each frontend would listen on a TCP or UDP port for directives
from other frontends.

-- each frontend would periodically (once a second?) broadcast
their current playback timecode to all other frontends.

-- each frontend would look at the received timecodes, average
them all (including their own in the mix), and then adjust
their local playback offset towards the average value.

-- Any PAUSE event (from keyboard, remote-control) received by
any frontend is broadcast to all other frontends, along with
the timecode at the originating frontend.

-- all other frontends would then replicate the PAUSE event
and set their own local playback timecode to match.

In the above points, I use "timecode" to mean "playback offset
within the current file" or whatever the equivalent Mythtv
term for that happens to be.  :)

Cheers