[mythtv-users] large mythtv deployment

[Michael T. Dean]

On 11/15/2008 02:05 PM, Michael Johnson wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 12:55 PM, Michael T. Dean wrote:
>   
>> On 11/15/2008 11:40 AM, Michael Johnson wrote:
>>     
>>>  On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 10:29 AM, Mike Perkins wrote:
>>>       
>>>> Michael Johnson wrote:
>>>>         
>>>>> I am doing a fairly large deployment of mythtv at work and I am
>>>>> looking for any pointers that may help us out. So far we have the
>>>>> following hardware for a mythtv cluster and we are now debating
>>>>> over the hd5500 or the WinTV-HD capture cards. We want 8x
>>>>> backends and 8x frontends.
>>>>>           
>>>> Why on earth do you want to have eight backends? Are you setting
>>>> these up to be completely independant of each other? It's not
>>>> necessary, and you will be duplicating files and effort.
>>>>         
>>>  We have 8 satellite feeds. So we don't necessarily want 8 backends,
>>>  however we want 8 capture cards hooked up (somehow) to the hardware
>>>  we have below.
>>>       
>> Are you sure that will work?  Are you absolutely certain that you're
>> getting ATSC feeds from your satellite?  And, if so, are you absolutely
>> certain that these feeds are unencrypted?  If the answer to either
>> question is no, the HD-5500 (and likely--though I don't know the
>> hardware--the WinTV-HD) won't work at all.  Feel free to ignore me since
>> it sounds like you have some special setup, so you probably know what
>> you're doing, but I just thought I would mention it just in case.
> when I say satellite feed I mean we have 8 satellite receivers in a single
> room and we plan on controlling them with an ir blaster.

Wouldn't that mean your only real option is the Hauppauge HD-PVR?  The 
HD-5500 needs an unencrypted ATSC source (i.e. Over-The-Air broadcast 
(8VSB modulation) or unencrypted cable (QAM modulation)).

You cannot input Component/VGA/DVI/HDMI to an HD-5500.  TTBOMK, the only 
thing you can use with Myth that takes an uncompressed HDTV signal (via 
Component) is the HD-PVR.

Still, though, the HD-PVR does all the compression for you, so the 
backend would just be writing data to disk.  If you run commercial 
flagging, the backend would also do that (though you can run 
mythjobqueue on any machine--including a very powerful frontend--to run 
commflagging jobs).  And, as Steve mentioned, transcoding is also 
normally done by backends (but can be done by any mythjobqueue host, if 
it has "local" access to the file--even using NFS or CIFS).

Mike