[mythtv-users] Comcast Cable encrypted channels

[Brian Wood]

On Tuesday 04 August 2009 13:59:13 David Madsen wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 11:53 AM, Andrew Gallatin <gallatin at cs.duke.edu> 
wrote:
> > I tried XBMC with a trial version of PlayON (which was running on XP
> > in a Virtual Box VM on my Hardy server) to stream Hulu.  It worked
> > tolerably well, except that fast foward and rewind did not work at
> > all. This is apparently a well known bug with PlayOn and XBMC.
>
> I have also done something similar.  I set up PlayOn in a VM running
> with KVM on my backend.  If you are going to leave it running full
> time, you'll have to dedicate 512 megabytes of memory to the VM, and
> you will need a pretty hefty CPU to keep up with the transcoding
> (probably at least 2.6-3Ghz Core2 or better for running on a single
> core.  Running an SMP guest VM seems to have a higher performance
> penalty and wasn't processing much faster than just running as a
> single core).  I have recently run into some problems with the speed
> of the transcoding in the VM after upgrading my kernel to 2.6.30 from
> 2.6.26 that I haven't fully tracked down yet.  This is a workable
> option for anyone interested though.

Just as a data point, I'm running PlayON in an XP VM under VirtualBox on a 
quad Opteron server (a pair of Opteron 275s). The VM has 1GB or RAM, and 
PlayOn can keep up with anything I've tried it with so far. I'm not concerned 
about the 1GB of RAM for the VM, since the machine has 16GB total. The server 
runs Lenny with 2.6.26.

The next release of VirtualBox (3.0) will support SMP VMs, apparently, but I 
don't know if PlayON can take advantage of this or not, or even if XP can.

>
> I didn't have the same problems with FF/REW that were mentioned.
> Seeking backward worked fine.  Seeking forward worked fine as well as
> long as you don't try to seek beyond the point the transcoding has
> reached.  I was using a PS3 as the client though instead of XBMC.

Shuttling seems to be very much related to the UPnP client. My experience is 
that the PS3 and the Myka are both very good, the DSM-520 is marginal at 
best.

-- 
Brian Wood
beww at beww.org