[mythtv-users] Going Virtual and upgrading tuners

[Joseph Fry]

>> Sounds good to me. A VM is a great way to run your BE, much easier to
>> deal with than learning arcane chroot or other types containers.
>
> If one has a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  VMs are not
> any more of a panacea than are jails or containers or different
> physical machines, or anything else.  All are tools to accomplish
> a particular goal.  One should not use any tool just because one
> has it available, or it is the thing you just bought (or now think
> you understand).  Often more than one tool is capable of
> accomplishing the stated goals, and one should choose the
> tool that is best for you.
>
> As an aside, there is also value in stretching your knowledge
> to understand those other tools rather than dismissing them
> because one thinks of them as arcane.  Most tools exist
> because the do something better than other tools for the
> particular goal.  That is true whether you are a woodworker,
> or a system administrator.

Saying chroot is arcane is like suggesting that bash, vi, emacs, or
virtually any other linux command is arcane and thus not worth
learning.   The fact is, chroot is core to what has made Unix and
Linux survive the test of time.

For example, virtually ever shared hosting provider uses chroot to
allow users to safely share a single box... without it, would *nux
have dominated the web hosting world... I think not.

Learning the basics of chroot takes minutes... and it might take you a
day of tinkering to be comfortable actually using it for production
use. Hardly a significant investment of time to gain a new, and quite
valuable, skill.

Of course while I was writing this, the OP explained his desire to use
VM's and I can't find fault with it... but typically VMs should not be
the go-to method of isolation, testing, etc.  Especially with Mythtv
as VM's have caused issues for some users.

I often wonder when the next big thing is going to trigger a bunch of
people to move their stuff off of VM's.  For example, when FFMPEG gets
updated to support the encode capabilities on the Intel '*bridge'
processors (http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/integrating-intel-media-sdk-with-ffmpeg-for-muxdemuxing-and-audio-encodedecode-usages),
who knows if it will work in a VM?  With a Core i7 able to transcode
several HD streams in realtime without breaking a sweat... everyone
will want it for HLS.