[mythtv-users] Home Media Network Advice. Help! :-)

[Phill Edwards]

> What I'd like to do is have a central media server in
> the basement, and client media adapters (players) in
> other rooms. What would be great is if the clients
> could schedule recordings independently but share each
> other's streams, along with DVD backups hosted on the
> central server.
>
> Is this something that is easily handled by MythTV? Is
> it pretty easy to set up multiple clients and a single
> server?

Yes - MythTV supports separate backends and frontends. The backends
have the tuner cards in them and do all the recording, the frontends
play back. You have lots of frontends pointing to 1 backend and you
can even have multiple backends if you want.

> As a noob in this area, I'm sure there is a lot that
> has already been posted on this topic, but I don't
> know the best search terms to separate the fluff from
> the gems. Hopefully some of you long timers can point
> the way.
>
> E.g. what are good video cards to use, a good site for
> building reasonably priced clients, gotchas in putting
> the network together, setting up IR with cable boxes,
> what can TiVo do that Myth can't, etc...

Some useful links are the MythTV wiki at
http://www.mythtv.info/moin.cgi/FrontPage and Jarod Wilson's excellent
step by step build guide at http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/ If you're new
to this I would highly recommend the latter and following it to get up
and running. If nothing else you'll get lots of support for it in this
forum as lots of us have done it that way.

Regards,
Phill