[mythtv-users] small portable DVR

[James Abernathy]

My main Mythtv backend is on my SAMBA/NFS NAS and is a Gen 3 Core i7 
with 8.5TB of drives used in a RAID 1. Works fine and I'll leave it 
alone except to replace fails drives occasionally. Having the mirror on 
my drives has saved me at least once a year.

Now to my new issue. I want a small portable OTA DVR to take with me 
when traveling in an RV. Since the weather is cold and messy I've been 
building test systems of all types to see what works.

My 3 types of hardware are a Raspberry PI3 B+,  an old 3rd Gen Core i3 
NUC and a Celeron 847 NUC.  All three would use external USB hard drives 
for the recording storage. The tuners would be HDHR.

The RPI3 is the best choice for size and power use, but I'm not sure 
about it as a combined FE/BE.  The Core i3 NUC is a good FE/BE if you 
use Kodi as I get tearing with mythtv-frontend. If I use either the RP3 
or Celeron as a backend I could take my Nvidia Shield TV to use as a 
frontend, which is the way I'm leaning.

So my questions is if I use the RP3 as a backend what software do I 
use.  I've seen the wiki about Mythtv Light, but that is mostly about 
FE. Do I start with Light and add mysql stuff?  Do I build regular 
mythtv from source for the RP3?

I know the RP3 is more powerful than I originally imagined because I 
built a test system with Raspbian Stretch 9 and TVheadend as a quick and 
dirty DVR and it worked well as a backend.  I could record at least 2 
HDTV programs while watching one of those time shifted.

Now I just need to build a test system with RP3 and mythbackend.

Jim A