[TriLUG] mythtv ramblings and a questions about december mythtvpresentation

[John Turner]

On Mar 22, 2005, at 2:16 PM, Tanner Lovelace wrote:

> On Tue, 22 Mar 2005 14:08:20 -0500, Byarlay, Wayne A. <wab at purdue.edu> 
> wrote:
>> Front End / Back End? I thought one simply built a linux computer 
>> with a
>> TV card, installed MythTV, and started watching movies immediately.
>> What's all this about a "front end"?
>>
>> A modded xbox would add about 2-300 bucks to the setup, right?
>>
>> /confused
>
> MythTV lets you separate the back end, or the TV recording functions,
> from the front end, or the TV viewing functions.  This allows you do do
> interesting things like have one big server with lots of TV capture 
> cards
> and a big disk for recording and then put a smaller viewer machine
> next to each TV in the house.  The smaller front end machines will
> all be able to access the recorded content from the backend machine.
>

One note from my research into HD-MythTV. The backend recorder can be 
slow as it doesn't do anything but read/write to disks. The frontend 
Myth box has to be BIG (I was reading Intel P4 2.5G+) because it has to 
do HDTV decoding in software.  I have not tried any of this yet, but if 
you want to do HDTV it seems to require a very fast frontend machine.

John