Right now my setup is a backend and frontend both in one box. Its a 2.8ghz machine with 1.5g ram. I bought a shuttle off ebay that I was planning to use as the front/backend and use the current box in another project. Well I dont need the current box for that project anymore so I am going to go with the current system as my master backend and stick it in the closet and have shuttle as my frontend in my entertainment center. Ive ordered another capture card so it will have dual PVR-150's. A couple questions.

How does running the backend and frontend effect the network? Can slowdowns be seen with other computers on a network when videos are watched.

Is there any lag in the controlling of videos? Like if I hit the skip button does it pause or is it just as quick as with one box.

I heard that in the newest version of MythTV its easier to add hard drives to certain locations. I have my dvd collection on a seperate hard drive and it took a good amount of frustrating work to get it working in the Videos directory. Is this easier to setup in the new version?

Thanks

I have 1 backend server and 2 frontends running on my network right now. I notice no network slowdown. Only problem I have is I have to reboot my router every 2 weeks or so, it seems consumer routers are not that reliable and my dlink tends to lock up.

As for controlling videos, no noticeable lag, its like you are running it locally for the most part.

I have a MBE in a rack in the basement with 3 FEs, all connected via 100Mb wired ethernet. I have noticed no lag when watching videos/recordings, listening to music, etc. Initial startup of a video may be slightly slower.

I suspect you are referring to the new Storage Groups feature coming in .21. See http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/changeset/12151 I don't now if you would be able to define a Storage Group for your music/video areas, I believe the intent was to be able to add to your recordings space.

Right, but he could (and could do it now) mount another drive under /myth/video
It could be a filesystem on another hard drive in the box, or NFS mounted to another box, even a Windows box.
Or, you can go hybrid, and mount other drives, from other systems, beneath /myth/video, /myth/music, or /myth/gallery

ex:
/myth/video/bt maps to //dmzXP/bittorrentvideo
/myth/music maps to //XP1/music
/myth/gallery/wifepc/sd maps to //wifepc/sd

Absolutely. I figured goaliemanpat already had this in place when he said I don't believe the process to do that will change with .21 however.

I have [i]only[i] separate front end and server, and there's no lag whatsoever. I run the backend, the Mac OS X front-end if I want to be in the computer room, and the XBoxes (via XBMCMythTV) for all the front ends. It's just as responsive as I could expect it to be. The XBoxes are only 100-mbs, and the two Macs are gigabit. Even when my wife is watching uncompressed, high quality recordings in the living room, I can still watch live TV on my Mac without any second thoughts.

With storage you could also look at your LVM

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Girkers

goaliemanpat:

The problem with your question is that it is a little too generic. You missed providing details.

Depending on your network, the answer could be yes or no. Is it wired, or wireless? If wired 10 mb, 100 mb, or gigabit? If it is wirelss 802.11 a, b, g, or n? I see so many wireless networks where the entire neighborhood is using the default channel 6, that I wonder how any of them actually manage to connect and get anything done. How many other machines are active on your network, and what are they doing?

While I can't testify, I would expect that bottom end specs might have problems.

How well does a separate FE/BE work over an 802.11g (54mbps) wireless network for 1080i HD recordings? I think this is theoretically 22mbps max which might be pushing it for this wireless spec.

I suppose the easy answer to this problem is to only use wired, or transcode all the HD to mpeg4.

It puts a few hundred Kb/s (MySQL traffic) over it if you are recording on a slave backend, and up to about 15Mb/s (best HDTV?) if you are watching a recording which is stored on a non-local hard disk, of if a backend is recording to a non-local disk.

This will be un-noticeable on a wired, switched 100MB/s network.

SD will cause some slight extra delays on a wireless network (particularly when FFWDing and jumping through a recording).
HD will not usually be usable on a wireless network. The faster ones will be better, but not perfect. Sorry.



Yes, but you would need to be using a lot of network traffic to notice.

e.g. If my master backend is doing nothing, I can scp files to it at 9MB/sec, or from it to my MacBook at 12MB/sec. While I am watching a recording which is stored on my slave backend, these drop to about 6MB/sec and 9MB/sec.
Most of the slow-down is due to CPU and hard disk speed, not network saturation.

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| Nigel Pearson, nigel.pearson.au@gmail.com
| "Things you own end up owning you" - Tyler, Fight Club