[mythtv-users] VMWare and MythTV

[Greg Woods]

On Wed, 2006-02-08 at 13:58 -0500, Joseph A. Caputo wrote:


> > The number of people who have reported great success with
> > mythfrontend over Wireless is small

Let me add one more then. I have a Sony Vaio laptop running FC4, and
mythfrontend over wireless works fine.

> > *refuse* to run an ethernet cable to said machine:

Running that cable out into the back yard seems a little impractical :-)

> > - don't waste your time with anything slower than 802.11g
> > - make sure your wireless driver is *WELL SUPPORTED*

Agreed. My laptop has an Atheros built-in chip supported by the madwifi
drivers. I do have an 802.11g access point. Be aware that, even if your
access point supports g, if you have any clients at all that are not
g-compatible, everyone gets the slower speed, so if you're counting on
the faster speed for something like mythfrontend, you can't have ANY
non-g clients.

> > - reduce your recording quality settings *WAY DOWN* so that
> > recordings and livetv use less than 1gb/hour

I haven't found it necessary to do this. 

> > - adjust time stretch down until stuttering stops to help you figure
> > out how much more you need to reduce recording quality for regular
> > playback (or get used to watching recordings veerryy sllooww)

I haven't found it necessary to do this either. In fact, I use
speeded-up time stretch to watch football and baseball games and it
works fine (don't try it with hockey though or you'll get dizzy :-)

> > - transcode your recordings to lower quality and bitrate before you
> > attempt to watch them over wireless
> > - use MythStreamTV to stream low(er) quality bitrate streams to a
> > wireless machine and just use any old media player
> > - after much frustration... give up and run an ethernet cable.

I haven't found it necessary to do any of these things either, and
running that cable out to the back yard hammock remains a difficult
option :-)

> One more tip:  try using an NFS mount for your Myth recordings instead 
> of relying on the backend to stream them. 

Perhaps this is the magic bullet, as this is what I have done from the
get go, even on my wired frontend system.

I'd guess the conclusion here is that your mileage may vary.

--Greg