Core Setup

[mlr263]

Hi,

I hope some of you Gurus out there can answer a configuration question for me.  I am planning to build a LME Core to go on a rack in my basement.  This would be a dedicated core, with, I presume, no GUI.  Would I would like to do is have my cable come in and feed directly into one or more AV Capture cards on my Core and have the Directors "bind", so to speak, to the AV Card for live cable.  The directors themselves would not have cable capture cards, and I would not have to run coax up to them.  First, is this possible?  Second, is it possible to have more than one AV Capture card installed on the core?

Thanks for your help.

Stuart

[PeteK]

Yes, this is certainly possible.  LinuxMCE (through MythTV) can in fact support as many cards as you can fit on your motherboard.

[mlr263]

Thanks for your response Pete.

So, just to reiterate.  The directors themselves would not have to have the Cable Coax run up to them, but could indeed view live tv over cat 5 from the core, which has the actual connection to the cable?  And this could be done with as many cards as the Core can fit in it, allowing as many Directors viewing as many different channels as there are Cable connections?

Thanks,

Stuart

[PeteK]

Yes. Just remember there are some limitations to this setup.  The primary one is that you will no longer have access to encrypted cable stations at your tv.  BTW, you are not limited to the number of cards that will fit in the core.  Check out the HDHomeRun for a good external tuner.

http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Hdhomerun

[mlr263]

Pete,

Aside from loss of access to encrypted cable stations, are there any other limitations?  BTW, thanks for the link on HdHomeRun.  Looks like a great product!!

Stuart

[PeteK]

The other major limitations are that you cannot watch any on demand video and you will have a larger lag when changing channels than you would with a cable box.

The only way around the first limitation is to actually use a cable box for each input at the core.  You can then use a USBUIRT to control it.  This would let you pass commands (eg. up, down, menu,select) to the cable box to allow you to do VOD.  Of course, when you use a cable box, you're stuck with SD at the moment.

The second problem is a bit more difficult to overcome.  If you change your surfing habits to flip through the guide and then select your channel (a transition that's not difficult but takes some time to adjust to), you'll be fine.  Otherwise, if you try to flip through the channels, you'll quickly get annoyed.

In the video, you'll notice that Paul put a cable box at his example TV to solve this problem (as well as the first).  Don't forget that you can also mix and match (i.e. use capture cards at the core/on the network) and use cable boxes where/if desired).

I suspect you can use the cable boxes at the core's location as well to address the on demand issue only, though I'm not completely sure how/if you can route commands for multiple MDs to a device at a single location.  I suspect it's supported, but I'm not sure.

[mlr263]

Thanks for all the information Pete.  You've been most helpful!!

[PeteK]

I slightly misspoke above.

You only need one cable box for each MD that you want to have on-demand access.  You can have it use DVR'd MythTV video (from and HDhomerun or PCI capture card) for all you other TV watching and use your cable box for on-demand or encrypted channels.  This is what's demonstrated in the video.

-PeteK

[mlr263]

OK.  One last question.  I was looking at getting my Directors, particularly this one:

http://www.cappuccinopc.com/pandora-965-dr.asp

... and I was wondering if, since a director will boot via the network, do I need to have hard drives in these?  I don't plan to have coax running to the directors, so seems to me that I could just net-boot, and not have to worry about configuring them at all.