[mythtv] Suggestion: option of sending Live TV stream to broadcastip adress

[Chris Wieringa]

>I'm currently testing Videolan features and they have simple possiblity to
>stream video to multiple clients on local network - they just send it to
>broacast IP address of local network (192.168.0.255 for instance). I have
>multiple mythtv frontends and would like to watch Live TV on all of them,
>with one (maybe the first one connected) being master for controlling
>stream.
>
>IP broadcast address is special address that is routed (wanted or not) to
>all clients by default so I guess there shouldn't be much problem of adding
>this possibility - maybe it's interesting to someone else too.

Interesting concept, but your suggestion for network design of this is
horrible.  For this kind of application, you want to do multicasting. 
Multicasting will allow multiple machines to receive the stream, however, you
won't be bombarding every single machine on your network with insane amounts of
broadcast traffic.  Broadcast is meant for finding computers and services  when
you don't know if something explicitly exists (DHCP discovery, finding game
servers on your local network, arps, etc), not for sending large gobs of data
to everyone.  Sending large amounts of data to several computers at the same
time is the goal of multicast.

-
Chris Wieringa
cwieri39 at calvin.edu