[mythtv-users] Slave Backend requirements
Doug Scoular (dscoular)
dscoular at cisco.com
Wed Aug 21 08:36:09 UTC 2013
Hi Gary/Raymond et al,
>Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2013 00:20:28 +0000
>From: Gary Buhrmaster <gary.buhrmaster at gmail.com>
>Another reason (and this is one of those extreme edge cases)
>is if a particular content source can only be obtained from one
>location far from your master BE. There was a post a few months
>ago about someone who had a fringe signal that could not be
>amplified (or at least not at a price he wanted to spend; even
>fringe signals can usually be amplified with extremely low noise
>amps (or pre-amps, or channel specific antenna design), but
>those can get expensive), so he wanted to locate the SBE in the
>garage (or something like that), and then run a network
>connection from there back to the MBE.
>
>And SBEs can have content storage, so it is an alternative
>(for some) to add additional storage.
The person with the fringe signal was actually me ;^)
So I'm asking about slave backends because I have a *eek*
Raspberry pi running raspbian that I can place in my
garage beside the antenna amplifier which has a built-in
Splitter. The master in the lounge is a *long* way away.
The reason I was asking whether it was possible to use
a Slave backend on a low powered machine was because
it would appear I would need to attempt to compile
the slave backend for raspbian since I could found no
up to date armhf repositories containing the myth backend
just a tar ball of unknown version. I didn't want to go
to the effort of attempting to cross compile mythtv for
Raspbian if Slave Backends have too high a CPU or memory
requirement.
The plan would be to have the powerful master do the scheduling
and commercial detection with the raspberry pi NFS mounting
storage via GigE and merely presenting it's tuners. It does work
perfectly with tvheadend writing HD streams to the NFS storage
on my master backend.
I'm also curious whether using vtuner might be a more feasible
approach. It would seem to have the lightest overhead for
presenting remote tuners to a Master Backend while being easier
to integrate with mythtv than tvheadend.
So, I'm still not clear on two questions (the latter being slightly
off topic):
1) Can a Slave Backend be used to simply present remote tuners and the
hard yards of transcoding, commercial detection and scheduling
be left to the Master Backend ?
2) Has anyone actually used vtuner and is it a reliable, low overhead
candidate that could be run on a low-end machine like a raspberry pi.
Cheers,
Doug
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