[mythtv-users] How to choose between 2 backends ?

[Stephen Worthington]

On Wed, 04 Apr 2018 21:51:24 +0200, you wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I have frontend and backend on a desktop pc.
>
>But I would also like to record tv on a laptop. This laptop has no screen and 
>the graphic card is probably to small to watch tv. I installed frontend on it 
>to test it, but now I want to use only the frontend on the desktop pc.
>
>So sometimes, I want to record tv on the laptop, but watch recorded episodes 
>on the desktop machine. Copy or move the recordings to the desktop pc should 
>be easy by ftp or an external usb hard disk.
>
>How to organize that ? How to tell frontend on the desktop pc which backend I 
>want to use ?
>
>In the setup, I saw the option "This server is the Master backend" I can 
>untick.
>
>Of course I can change IP address in mythtv-setup, but there is certainly a 
>more elegant solution. Is it possible to create profiles for this purpose ?
>
>Bye
>
>Klaus

To get a frontend to connect to multiple different backends, the
easiest way I have found is just to have multiple config.xml files in
the /home/<username>/.mythtv directory, one for each backend.  When
you want to switch backends, you copy the config.xml.backendx file to
config.xml and start mythfrontend again.  If there are only two
backends, I would write a little script to do the swap.  Whenever it
was run, it would copy the other config.xml file and tell you which
backend it was now configured for.  To make it easier to used, you
could make the script run from an icon on the desktop, or from a
desktop menu.  Or you could make the script run mythfrontend for you,
and each time it runs it, ask first which backend to connect to.

To copy recordings from one backend to another, you can use
mythexport/mythimport.  This uses a web page to select the recordings
to be exported and where to put them, and creates a copy of the
recording file and a .sql file with the recording's database entries
in it.  You have mythexport store the files where the other backend
can see them, or you move them to the other backend (eg using a USB
drive), and run mythimport on that directory.  Mythimport reads the
.sql files and imports the data into the database and moves the
recording files into one of the recording directories where that
backend can see them.  I wrote the current version of mythimport:

http://www.jsw.gen.nz/mythtv/mythimport.html