[mythtv-users] Slave Backend requirements

[Doug Scoular (dscoular)]

Hi Gary/Raymond et al,

>Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2013 00:20:28 +0000
>From: Gary Buhrmaster <gary.buhrmaster at gmail.com>
>Another reason (and this is one of those extreme edge cases)
>is if a particular content source can only be obtained from one
>location far from your master BE.  There was a post a few months
>ago about someone who had a fringe signal that could not be
>amplified (or at least not at a price he wanted to spend; even
>fringe signals can usually be amplified with extremely low noise
>amps (or pre-amps, or channel specific antenna design), but
>those can get expensive), so he wanted to locate the SBE in the
>garage (or something like that), and then run a network
>connection from there back to the MBE.
>
>And SBEs can have content storage, so it is an alternative
>(for some) to add additional storage.


	The person with the fringe signal was actually me ;^)

	So I'm asking about slave backends because I have a *eek*
	Raspberry pi running raspbian that I can place in my
	garage beside the antenna amplifier which has a built-in
	Splitter. The master in the lounge is a *long* way away.

	The reason I was asking whether it was possible to use
	a Slave backend on a low powered machine was because
	it would appear I would need to attempt to compile
	the slave backend for raspbian since I could found no
	up to date armhf repositories containing the myth backend
	just a tar ball of unknown version. I didn't want to go
	to the effort of attempting to cross compile mythtv for
	Raspbian if Slave Backends have too high a CPU or memory
	requirement.

	The plan would be to have the powerful master do the scheduling
	and commercial detection with the raspberry pi NFS mounting
	storage via GigE and merely presenting it's tuners. It does work
	perfectly with tvheadend writing HD streams to the NFS storage
	on my master backend.

	I'm also curious whether using vtuner might be a more feasible
	approach. It would seem to have the lightest overhead for
	presenting remote tuners to a Master Backend while being easier
	to integrate with mythtv than tvheadend.

	So, I'm still not clear on two questions (the latter being slightly
	off topic):

1) Can a Slave Backend be used to simply present remote tuners and the
   hard yards of transcoding, commercial detection and scheduling
   be left to the Master Backend ?

2) Has anyone actually used vtuner and is it a reliable, low overhead
   candidate that could be run on a low-end machine like a raspberry pi.

	Cheers,

	Doug