[ale] Using MythTV in a networked DVR farm setting

[Daniel Howard]

Chris Farris wrote:
  > Myth will automagically figure that out. You will need recorders for the
> number of shows the teachers plan to simultaneously record. Are you
> recording off the air or from cable/satellite? If the latter you will
> need one cable box per recorder. 

I'm thinking one Myth box for the Comcast cable TV feed (where we can 
get program guide info easily for the viewer/web interface) with two or 
more PVR-350 cards, and then a separate box for the Georgia Public 
Broadcasting satellite service to schools, which has at least two 
channels of interest to our elementary school (elementary channel, and 
special projects channel).  I have no idea yet how to get the program 
guide from GPB's web site

http://www.gpb.org/public/education/schedule.jsp?f=date&d=2006-01-21

but with open source, maybe we can get into a typical program guide 
database and see how it's structured so we can script something in Perl 
to go get the program guide info from the web site and reformat it into 
a program guide that Myth understands.  I know this will take a bit of 
work, but I do have access to Perl programmers I can get some help from.
> 
> The advantage of this is that you don't need a special client in the
> class room. The latest version of Myth 0.19 records in a format that
> windows media player understands. As long as the PC is connected to an
> over head of some sort, the teacher can browse to the web interface and
> play the movie that way. 

Our clients are K12LTSP, with K12LTSP servers available to/in all rooms 
now.  We don't have overheads in each class yet, but a group of the 
parents is willing to spring for 27" TVs for each room, that's how a lot 
of this got started.  Given that we'll have 1) recorded digital video 
from Comcast and the two satellite channels (which we may recompress for 
local network file transfer/streaming), we can either display the video 
to the classroom TV via a classroom MythTV box with TV-out video card 
(e.g., the cheap thin client you mention below), or we can put a TV-out 
video card in the LTSP server and run a coax/S-video line to the TV. 
That works for broadcast to the entire class.  For students that the 
teacher wants to let watch recorded or already online video by 
themselves (e.g. United Streaming), we can play those on the clients 
from the LTSP server.  I think this gives us the best of both worlds for 
now.
> 
> Or - you can buy cheap thin clients with TV-Out and install MythFrontend
> on them. Was that what you wanted to do with the LTSP servers?

This is what we'll do for each classroom for playing video on LTSP 
clients if playing videos on the LTSP servers prevents them from 
adequately serving the clients for other PC activities.

Daniel