[mythtv-users] Raspberry PI as backend slave or tvheadend as tuner ?

[Michael Watson]

On 5/06/2013 12:11 PM, Doug Scoular (dscoular) wrote:
> Hi All,
> I have a tricky problem, I live on the fringe of Sydney and get a very 
> marginal DVB-T signal.
>
> The signal is just strong enough to support one tuner (well a dual 
> tuner with one co-ax input – a Sony PlayTV tuner).
>
> I recently obtained a second PlayTV tuner and have an older antenna on 
> my garage roof. Using a co-ax splitter isn't an option as the signal 
> is already marginal and boosted. I have ethernet connectivity to the 
> garage but no co-ax between the lounge and the garage. I was thinking 
> I could use a spare raspberry pi in the garage connected to the spare 
> PlayTV tuner and antenna as a mythtv slave backend and connect that 
> via ethernet to my master backend.
>
> I've only seen discussion of the Raspberry Pi being a dubious choice 
> for either a master backend (due to the scheduling processing costs 
> and/or recoding costs) or a frontend where the video decoding/ program 
> guide display may be an issue. I was wondering what people thought of 
> using the Raspberry Pi as a mythtv slave backend. Presumably it merely 
> presents the tuner to the master and could write recordings to an NFS 
> mount.
>
> If the overhead of running a mythtv slave backend is too much for a 
> Raspberry Pi I was then wondering if tvheadend (which seems to work 
> for XBMC) might be a possibility.
>
> So I guess I have 2 questions:
>
>  1. Would a Raspberry Pi be a reasonable platform to consider for a
>     mythtv slave backend ?, or if not:
>  2. Are there any plans to allow a mythtv backend to use tvheadend as
>     a remote tuner ?
>
> Many thanks in advance.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Doug
>
Could try upgrading the Aerial (or adding a Mast Head amplifier to the 
existing aerial to obtain better signal quality.
Another option, rather than use a Raspbery Pi, purchase a Core2 Shand 
System, there are plenty of low cost HP SFF Desktops available on ebay 
that work excellently as a sbe. If configured to shutdown when not in 
use, it wont cost you a fortune in power.