MythTV Capture Card Requirements With Multiple Front Ends
I have start to live the dream of time shifting commercial skipping T.V programs and it’s all done in MythTV. Today I have discovered why someone mentioned they had 4 T.V capture cards in their system was not so ridiculous any more.
The situation was my girlfriend was watching live T.V on the Linux box running both Myth front and back end. I then tried to access live T.V using the eeePC which only has the front end install. I thought at least with one tuner I could watch the same channel as what was on the Linux box but I was wrong.
For every front end wanting to watch live T.V at the same time you need a separate tuner for each whether the front ends were accessing the same or different live channel. This sucks. Although MythTV can cater for this situation very easily with the support of multiple cards in one machine or having a cluster of slave machines it still means extra cost for expanding the system as the centre of home entertainment. This implication also means for every turner you have needs a T.V ariel / cable / dish cable. Assuming the man had 4 analogue capture cards he would have had to split the cable 4 times into each card in theory. How much does the quality degrades when this happens?
I am glad to hear that one system can watch live T.V and others can access the recorded stuff still but the discovery of this situation means it can get very messy very quickly.
On a lighter note, I wish Hauppauge was still selling the PVR350 so I can add just one more tuner to my current set up.
