[mythtv-users] Way out idea on watching same thing in multiple rooms

[Christopher X. Candreva]

On Mon, 4 Jan 2010, tortise at paradise.net.nz wrote:

> this might work.  I think the elegant and proper answer lies in multicast 
> streams, either from the FE or perhaps preferably the BE.  Using multicast 
> quite simply avoids any sync issues. Nick Rout made a suggestion that 

I don't think so. Think of two playback units with different sized buffers. 
Without sync data they can be at different points in the multicast stream.
The stream starts comming in at the same time, but a system waiting for a 
(say) 20 meg buffer to fill will start after one waiting for a 10meg buffer 
to fill. Then when the master pauses, will simple tell the others 
to pause too ? If the master decides to rewind to hear the last line again, 
will the other follow ?

Multicast solves a different problem, not sending the same data over the 
network two or three times. Perhaps for a situation where you had 20 or more 
screens to sync (like a mall I was in recently with monitors showing the 
same cartoons everywhere) that might be usefull. I don't think the average 
100mbit home network is going to be overloaded by 2 or 3 machines watching 
at once.

Again thinking broadly, and I know I'm going to mix metaphores here, what 
I'm suggesting should be possible by piping something like the regular 
standard out text stream of mplayer into the telnet interface of a myth 
frontend. All it has to say is play this, and this is where in the media you 
want to be.

How to access it  -- NFS, SMB, multicast stream, or even a copy of the same 
file on a local disk -- is a separate problem.




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Chris Candreva  -- chris at westnet.com -- (914) 948-3162
WestNet Internet Services of Westchester
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