[mythtv-users] media mvp

[Roger Heflin]

Nick Rout wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 8:46 AM, Roger Heflin <rogerheflin at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Kevin Robbins wrote:
>>> Once again, awesome feedback! This particular "frontend" is intended to go
>>> in my  3 year olds room  and needs to be able to do videos  and pre recorded
>>> programs  with ease. Now I guess I am leaning towards the apple TV again to
>>> have an actual frontend without network boot, that confuses the crap outta
>>> me.
>>>
>>>
>> The network boot is the hardest part, once you get it to work, it just works so
>> long as you don't go changing things around on the device booting it.
>>
>> The VLC stuff is invisible once it is setup and working and the mvpmc
>> automatically uses it when something is viewed from the filebrowser that does
>> not have a mp3 or mpg extension.
> 
> When you say invisible, what sort of performance hit does VLC's
> transcoding have on the backend performance. I am not sure I have
> followed this right, but I am guessing VLC is doing real time
> transcoding.

It depends on what the original video resolution is.

If the original is SD and the machine is decent 3.2GhzP4/2GhzAMD or a single 
core from any of the dual core machines, then it will take less than 1/2 of a 
cpu, and won't affect anything on the backend.   If the original is 1080i or 
720p things get more demanding-If you backend has hardware encoders I have not 
seen vlc interfere with recording, if your backend has software encoding in 
mythtv then things get messy, or if you are trying to support multiple mvpmc's 
with a single backend without have multi-core things would get messy, or if 
something is using massive amounts of cpu time on the vlc machine things start 
to stutter.

You can put vlc on anything that has file access to the files, so the machine 
running vlc does not even need to be an actual backend.   I have used a backend 
machine and I have used a non-backend, neither has caused any issues on the 
backend or on the desktop machine being used.

                           Roger