MythTV on the Core?

[archived]

Can MythTV be set up so that the PVR cards are installed in the core and the M/D would play TV from the core?

Is that even a good idea?

What effect would it have on the hardware requirements on the M/D(e.g. more or less CPU power)?

Thanks

Colin

[archived]

yes, myth is actually designed to do that and it works fine.  I don't think CPU is really affected very much on the media director, but it does add more CPU to the core since the core will be doing the capturing.  The myth installation we include is a standard one, so you can do anything with the myth in Pluto that you can outside.  The setup wizard just creates a vanilla myth that assumes you have one PVR card in the media director.  Eventually we would like to expand upon our setup wizard so it is able to automatically configure more sophisticated installations like what you described.  However at the moment if you want such a configuration you will have to read to the myth documentation and configure it by hand the normal myth way.

[archived]

So it sounds like it's just a matter of creating a network boot image that has MythTV configured to get the content from a central server. Upon further reading of the docs, it sounds like the media is stored on the core in the default installation, and the only odd thing I'm doing is not putting capture cards into my media directors.

On further reflection I'm thinking the right approach might be to have a single central media director with all the capture cards and then configure the rest of them without capture cards. My basic goal is to get the cost of the media directors as low as possible, and since it's likely I'll want more of them than number of inputs I'd like to record simultaneously, centralizing the capture cards seems like the way to go.

I expect all this will make more sense once I cobble together some hardware and actually start poking around.

Thanks.

[archived]

In Myth terms, would it be correct to say that each media director is a  slave backend as well as a frontend?  I am thinking of a similar implementation to that of the parent post, but I want to run the capture cards in a separate system from my Core.   I currently run my mythbackend with 3 capture cards in the basement in my rack, and have CAT5 strung around the house but no coax.  I guess my question boils down to this: if I set up an MD in the basement with all the capture cards in it, can the other MDs around the house view live TV?

[archived]

we haven't tested all this yet, and we probably will want to make some changes to our Myth wrappers--we don't have a lot of experienced myth programmers, so our myth integration is not as good as it could be.  We actually have not changed myth at all.  so you could probably change myth's config manually to do what you want--I don't think we overwrite the configuration files, we only use default files that are loaded when myth is first installed.  however our ultimate goal is to make it really easy for the user, so that he can just add PVR capture cards anywhere he wants and share them throughout the home.

[archived]

Welmes -

Just beginning my exploration of Pluto, but have been using Myth for a while and can try to answer your questions.

"if I set up an MD in the basement with all the capture cards in it, can the other MDs around the house view live TV?"

I the classic Myth sense any Mythfrontend running in the house would require its own unoccupied tuner to watch "Live TV" from the ring buffer.  (can be paused/rew/ffwd if behind).

Are you asking for different functionality?  Do you want the same "Live TV" stream on all/any MD in the house?  Myth (as of 0.18.1) is not capable of this.  Pehaps the ring buffer could be forked out through VLS/VLC?

[archived]

Aaron.B. -

MythTV's config information is stored almost exclusivley in its MySQL database.  Initially mythtv-setup is run to set-up cards and listings.  Adding another card is as simple as running mythtv-setup again.

[archived]

That's good.  We also store all configuration in our MySql database.  For example, in the pluto admin site, if I say that in my living room I have: a DVD player, a VCR, a TV, a Receiver, a Sat box, and a PVR capture card.  Connections:
dvd player->(video ) TV (input 2) ->(audio) Receiver (input Video 1)
VCR->TV (Input 3)
Sat Box - LIVE TV: ->TV (input 3)
Sat Box - RECORDED TV -> ivtv PVR Capture card (input S-Video) -> TV (input 4)
OTA antenna - LIVE TV: ->TV (input Tuner)
OTA antenna - RECORDED TV: ivtv PVR Capture card (input Antenna) -> TV (input 4)

Those are all devices in the pluto_main database (table: Device), and the connections in table: Device_Device_Pipe.  Our media plugin needs all this information:  Say I hit 'fast forward' on one of my i/r remotes.  The command comes in through the i/r device, is intercepted by the media device, which determines the current video source is the DVD player, so it translates the i/r into a dvd fast forward.  I hit volume up, and it knows that type of command follows the 'audio' connection, so it goes from the current source (dvd) down the audio connection to the Receiver and sends the receiver a volume up.

This approach means without any programming the user can pick up virtually any remote in the house and any i/r code will be translated and do what the user expects.  It also means we have a complete connection diagram of how all the stuff in the house is wired--where the pvr cards are and so on.

Therefore, we have enough information to automatically configure all the myth systems in a very intuitive manner.  For example, what we're doing now with VDR is that it always keeps track of each users favorite shows and channels.  So when I hit TV, the nearest TV comes on to my most favorite show automatically (say CNN).  But it also finds unused capture cards throughout the home and uses those to capture video preview windows of my other preferred shows, and feed those preview windows to the orbiter.  So, when I hit tv on the web pad orbiter my most favorite show 'larry king on cnn' comes on automatically.  But my 2nd most favorite show 'er on NBC' appears as a preview window on the web pad, along with my 3rd, 4th, etc. (depending on how many unused cards are in the home).  This way chances are i won't need to use the epg.  If I want to watch 'er' I just touch the preview window for 'er' on the web pad and er appears on the main tv and cnn appears on the web pad's preview window where er was.

We're trying to put lots of logic like this in our vdr plugin so that the user experience is very intuitive and every user can leverage all the media resources throughout the house.  Since we have 1 central database that lists all media devices and all connections, we could probably do some auto-configuration of all the myth players by setting values in myth's database to make things more automatic.  But none of us are too familiar with Myth, so at the moment, we don't really do anything to pre-configure or coordinate the myth setup.  No configuration settings in pluto's setup carry over to myth.  We just install the vanilla myth package and it's up to the user to configure Myth on his own using Myth's normal config mechanism.

[archived]

With VDR presumably you could access any of the channels delivered accross the mulitplex (usually upto 6) from a single card at any given time. That way you get 6 digital channels from a single card somewhere on the network. All the DVB-T cards seems to support this capability.

Therefore, we have enough information to automatically configure all the myth systems in a very intuitive manner.  For example, what we're doing now with VDR is that it always keeps track of each users favorite shows and channels.  So when I hit TV, the nearest TV comes on to my most favorite show automatically (say CNN).  But it also finds unused capture cards throughout the home and uses those to capture video preview windows of my other preferred shows, and feed those preview windows to the orbiter.  So, when I hit tv on the web pad orbiter my most favorite show 'larry king on cnn' comes on automatically.  But my 2nd most favorite show 'er on NBC' appears as a preview window on the web pad, along with my 3rd, 4th, etc. (depending on how many unused cards are in the home).  This way chances are i won't need to use the epg.  If I want to watch 'er' I just touch the preview window for 'er' on the web pad and er appears on the main tv and cnn appears on the web pad's preview window where er was.

We're trying to put lots of logic like this in our vdr plugin so that the user experience is very intuitive and every user can leverage all the media resources throughout the house.  Since we have 1 central database that lists all media devices and all connections, we could probably do some auto-configuration of all the myth players by setting values in myth's database to make things more automatic.  But none of us are too familiar with Myth, so at the moment, we don't really do anything to pre-configure or coordinate the myth setup.  No configuration settings in pluto's setup carry over to myth.  We just install the vanilla myth package and it's up to the user to configure Myth on his own using Myth's normal config mechanism.

[archived]

correct.  there's some logic needed that's not there to determine which dvb cards can be shared.  ie right now living room and bedroom can share 1, but when bedroom changes to a different channel, it may need a different one.  at this moment, for simplicity, we're just doing a 1 to 1 without sharing, but it will be added.