[mythtv] MythTV Hardware Architecture

[Bruno Rodrigues]

Leonardo's product looks very good (although expensive) and picking up
the subject I'd like to hear some comments about hardware solutions for
mythtv.

Please take this mail as some notes I'd like to share with you, or hear
your opinions.

Context: I don't have any television in my house. I have a computer and
a 19" monitor which does Internet cable network gateway, wireless access
control, mail and http server, and television. As I have a PIII 650 and
an Hauppage bt878 card, I need to get a new solution, with a PVR, a
faster CPU or something else.


MythTV architecture allows me to have two different solutions for a home
product: 
* have one machine with very silent components
* have one small machine in my living room and one powerful server in my
home-office

You'll need a very quiet machine to sell your product. People are used
to no-noise products in your living room. Even a VCR, when playing, does
almost no noise at all.

Having one machine requires a very quiet hard disk. It's relatively easy
to make a machine without fans or with really quiet fans, but it's hard
to shut up an hard disk. I have now a IBM 20GB (don't know which model)
and tuning hdparm -M (acoustic parameter) I'm able to not hear my hard
disk heads, only the sound of it spinning.

If you get a two machine solution, you'll be able to make a diskless
station in your living room and a server with lots of disks, dvd
recorders, etc in your closed-door office.

To have this two machine solution, MythTV should rewrite it's
architecture (I know there's someone already doing this) so it's
consistent whenever is using backend or whenever is using frontend - I
mean, it currently gets video from backend server but reads mp3 from
frontend server.

Every module should be able to read data from backend and frontend.
Having backend read data from frontend as I read in this mailing list is
low priority IMHO (look for zero-conf comments). For example, mythmusic
should stream files in backend server AND read from local disk and local
cdrom. Same for mythpicture, and mythvideo. 
If you use mythdvd, you'll want to read local dvd, but you'll probably
want to send dvd data to be compressed in backend server.

If you want to have more than two frontends, mythtv should allow second
frontend to access live tv streaming instead of saying that there's no
tuner and I should go play a stream in other menu. You'll then get
several frontends playing live tv but only first one connected will be
able to change channels and so. It might even be possible to change
who's in command (if I go to bed and forgot to turn off living room
frontend, I'd like to change channels).

Aditionaly, plugins should be better integrated to allow showing weather
in a translucent window over your tv feed.


I'll send more note later if you want to have a discussion about this.

Please note that these are not "please do this for me". I'd be glad to
do more code for mythtv and my only problem is lack of time. I'd like to
have this discussion first before trying to code something..

regards