[mythtv-users] Best way to integrate a Netflix feed into Myth ?

[Raymond Wagner]

On 8/22/2011 14:28, Brian J. Murrell wrote:
> On 11-08-22 02:19 PM, Eric Sharkey wrote:
>> It would be
>> better if mythTV had a pass-through mode that disabled buffering to
>> disk, eliminating the ability to pause/record/rewind but providing
>> lower latency playback of the content and a way to pass through remote
>> control commands from the frontend to the STB/appliance, but nothing
>> like that exists right now.
> I've previously wondered if that "write-to-disk-read-from-disk" latency
> were actually necessary for something like live-tv.
>
> As I understand it, currently when you watch live-tv, myth starts
> recording the tv channel and then starts playing back from the stream
> it's writing to disk, incurring the latency.

If everyone were actually streaming live, no, it wouldn't be necessary.  
The problem comes when you start trying to diverge from live.  You only 
want a couple seconds of video in memory at any given time.

The best way to handle this would be to keep the two buffers, but allow 
them to be linked, one writing to the other.  If the read buffer on the 
backend diverges too far, it would decouple from the write buffer, and 
begin reading from the disk directly.  There would be other required 
changes.  You would need to force the ringbuffer on the frontend to read 
remotely from the backend during use of LiveTV.  You would need to 
rework the option to force streaming from the master backend, or only 
allow it to operate when not using LiveTV.  You would need to make sure 
the streaming and filesize updates were granular enough that the 
ringbuffer classes continue to function with such little readahead.

The code itself is not a great deal of work, but actually making it 
function properly would be difficult.