Hi All,
I'm looking at setting up a PVR system in my house and I want to set up with the noisy part of the system shut away in a cupboard and with the minimum amount of coax for aerials. A seperate frontend system looks ideal to me with possibly multiple capture cards, however... I cant work out if its possible to watch live TV on a seperate frontend machine. Is it possible to watch tv as it comes in on a remote box? I cant think of what technical issues would be involved and google hasnt thrown up anything on this situation.

Thanks in advance
Peter Theobald

Yeah you can watch live tv on a separate frontend, its dead easy to setup once you have a working backend.

Brilliant. i was hoping so. It means i'll only need to run cat5 round the house rather than coax as well. As a linked question. what sort of bandwidth would be used by streaming live tv and is it possible to stream the same live tv/radio program to 2 boxes at once? I'll get a box up and running with knoppmyth as soon as I can and see what it can really do.
p

The amount of bandwitdth depends on the recording profiles (bitrate). If you go with 100MBit, you can't go wrong there.

It is definately possible two have multiple frontends watch TV at the same time, but the number of frontends watching Live TV at the same time is limited to (=) the number of tuners you have. For example: If you have one tuner and two frontends, then the first frontend to watch live TV will "claim" the tuner and that leaves only watching recordings (or MythMusic, Mythvideo etc) for the other frontend. It's no problem for two frontends to watch the same recording or video (from MythVideo) at the same time.

Thanks, that makes perfect sense. Basically as far as I see it, if I wanted to have the same channel on in 4 different rooms (for instance), also record that channel and record another channel at the same time, I would in fact need 6 tuners, even though i'm only interested in 2 seperate distinct channels. Thanks for your help
Pete

No this is in fact not true, you would only need two tuners if you plan it right. For example you record both the channels and after about 5 mins you could then start watching the recording on the 4 frontends similtaneously as it is watching the recording not the live tv feed.

This is based on the theory of the system as I know it.

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Girkers

If I remember right, in coming version of mythtv ALL live TV will be recordings (ringbuffer disappears), and the you probably won't have to plan in advance to start a recording for the above situation.

In most cases though, users of mythtv seldom watch live TV, but let the tuners take care of recordings and then watch recorded shows later.

I was disapointed when I first found out you needed one tuner per frontend watching live tv. Now I realise its a non-issue, in the 2-3 months i've had it up and running I've only watched live TV 4 or 5 times!

Thats fantastic. I doubt i'll be in a position to make a decent mythtv system in the next few months so hopefully i'll not need to buy an extra tuner card for each lan client round the house. I assume that this means a live tv show will be automatically recorded by myth at the time and can be watched by multiple clients at once. Thanks for your help everyone. Looks like mythtv is exactly what i'm after.
Pete