[mythtv-users] Transcoder slave

[Chris Pinkham]

> I've searched the archives and have found no more than questions gone
> unanswered.
> 
> Is there a way to have a slave backend do nothing but transcoding and
> comflagging, and where is it documented if there is such a way?
> 
> Thanks in advance for any response.

Commerical flagging is possible both with both previous and current CVS
although with 2-3 different methods.  Previous releases allowed you to
setup a dedicated mythbackend that didn't have any tuners and then
go into config and setup that backend as a dedicated commercial flagging
host.

Current CVS has a JobQueue and commercial flagging and transcoding jobs
are fired off via the JobQueue.  You can use the same method above to
setup a dedicated backend but the concept of a "dedicated commercial
flagging host" is gone.  There is a screen in the backend setup program
that lets you specify which jobs are allowed to run on that backend, so
you could setup myth to only run commercial flagging on 2 out of 3 of
your backends, or 1 out of 3, etc..  There is also a new mythjobqueue
executable in CVS that lets you just run mythjobqueue without setting
up a full (tunerless) backend on a machine.  You just run the backend
setup to setup the allowed JobQueue jobs and fire off mythjobqueue
and it will start processing jobs out of the queue.  Commercial flagging
will work on any machine, but I am not sure about transcoding.  I believe
the transcoder requires direct access to the recordings directory, so
you might be able to get remote transcoding jobs working if you have
a shared NFS recordings directory, but Geoffrey would be able to give
a more definite answer on that than I can since he wrote the transcoder.

I run mythjobqueue occasionally on one my development machine to process
jobs in the queue since it can process them quicker than my slow
master backend can do them.

-- 

Chris