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SDNick484
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Joined: 05 Dec 2005
Posts: 231
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 Posted: Wed Feb 21, 2007 1:07 am Post subject: MythTV Frontend |
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I recently set up MythTV with a dedicated backend (formerly it ran both backend and frontend) on a desktop running Fedora Core 6, and I am running the frontend (non-dedicated) remotely (over 802.11g) on my laptop. One thing I noticed immediately was the lack of certain features which were available on my desktop when both the backend and frontend were running on the same machine. In particular mythmusic and mythdvd features are not present. On my laptop I have only emerged mythtv with frontendonly and a few other USE flags. I presumed I didn't need to emerge mythmusic and other plugins because they're present on the backend; is this not the case?
On a side note, MythTV crashes when I try to watch live TV on my laptop while in Xgl & Beryl with ATI's proprietary drivers. I rectified the situation by starting a standard X server on vt8, and running MythTV there.
One last thing, I'm considering moving MythTV from my desktop to my "server" which is always on. The server isn't exactly a powerhouse (Via C3 2000+ which is like a Intel P3 800MHz, 512MB of PC133, and a Hauppauge 150). This is why I'm switching to a server-client system instead of an all in one box. I will only be recording standard cable, one channel at a time. The box is my mail, NFS, & web server however I'm the only user of it so these services aren't extremely taxing. Does anyone think I'll run into performance issues? Will the server be too weak to run mythstreamtv? |
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dspahn
Guru
Joined: 22 Jun 2006
Posts: 392
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| Posted: Wed Feb 21, 2007 5:11 am Post subject: some answers.... |
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AFAIK, you need to install the add-in/plugin-type apps on the frontend (makes sense; you run a DVD, little data needs to even reach the backend...)
From my experience, ATI's proprietary drivers barely work with XGL- they work well & smoothly, but it has always taken me a lot of work and research to get XGL up and running with beryl consistently. I wish I could give better advice on fixing the crash issue- you could always try disabling individual elements in the Beryl control panel and see if something like the window spawning animations or something like that affect it.
as far as your server is concerned, I would expect performance problems, depending on how many pages you serve, how buig they are, how many and how big the number of emails you receive, how often you run mythfilldatabase, how much you record.... etc. IIRC, your setup is fairly close to the minimum required to run Myth with an accelerated MPEG-2 card (the 150), without adding a SQL server, transcoding, commercial flagging, email, web serving, file serving. I would expect problems, but if your usage is low on the other things your server is doing, it *may* run OK. I don't have experience with seperating the frontend and backend, but what I did was I set up a dedicated SQL server on a 1.2 GHz Xeon with 256 MB RAM, and the processor maxes out (I can tell by the fan activity) occasionally, and also during mythfilldatabase runs... Hope this helps! |
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Hobbes-X
l33t
Joined: 04 Feb 2004
Posts: 823
Location: Seattle, WA
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| Posted: Wed Feb 21, 2007 2:39 pm Post subject: Re: MythTV Frontend |
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| SDNick484 wrote: | | One thing I noticed immediately was the lack of certain features which were available on my desktop when both the backend and frontend were running on the same machine. In particular mythmusic and mythdvd features are not present. On my laptop I have only emerged mythtv with frontendonly and a few other USE flags. I presumed I didn't need to emerge mythmusic and other plugins because they're present on the backend; is this not the case? |
The plugins are needed on each local machine you want to use them on- they'll need access to the directories where the media is stored too, in the case of mythmusic and mythvideo. Also, the frontendonly USE flag probably doesn't do what you expect. It's only setting a compile time flag that hasn't been maintained upstream for some time, and you may not get some of myth's support programs you'd expect on a frontend machine. It was never intended for actuall use, but to allow myth to compile in a usable way for people porting to OSX and the like.
| Quote: | | One last thing, I'm considering moving MythTV from my desktop to my "server" which is always on. The server isn't exactly a powerhouse (Via C3 2000+ which is like a Intel P3 800MHz, 512MB of PC133, and a Hauppauge 150). This is why I'm switching to a server-client system instead of an all in one box. I will only be recording standard cable, one channel at a time. The box is my mail, NFS, & web server however I'm the only user of it so these services aren't extremely taxing. Does anyone think I'll run into performance issues? Will the server be too weak to run mythstreamtv? |
That machine will have no problem recording using a hardware capture card, but mythstreamtv will probably overload it. Even without mythstreamtv, you'll want to make sure to enable the slow deletes option in mythtv-setup and be sure to schedule mythfilldatabase at times when you don't expect to do any recording- as dspahn said, mythfilldatabase can make for sudden spikes in usage, and that can cause myth to drop frames in the recording. |
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SDNick484
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Joined: 05 Dec 2005
Posts: 231
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| Posted: Thu Feb 22, 2007 6:13 am Post subject: |
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Thank you both for your responses so far; I hope the maintainers consider dropping the frontendonly USE tag as it's definitely misleading.
As to Xgl, yeah the ATI drivers definitely suck, but I've been using it since the coffee-buzz overlay days (wow, it's almost been a year...) so I know a fair share of workarounds (eg. screen, Xgame, etc.) and spawning a second X server is a simple enough solution (useful for running other 3D apps too). It was interesting to see that my desktop, which has a 9600XL, uses AIGLX in Fedora Core 6 with the open source Radeon driver and it performs fine. Therefore I'm inclined to say it's an Xgl issue and not Beryl. I tried getting AIGLX to work with my X300 on my laptop but no go. In fact I have to give the Fedora devs credit, getting Beryl to work in FC6 was as simple as "yum install beryl emerald" then running beryl-manager.
Server performance ought to be interesting. I'm currently not serving any really heavy web pages, and most of my mail is pre-filtered because it's fetched from other remote accounts. I was checking out the readme with mythstreamtv, and the author claims he was initially using it on a P3 1GHz which is fairly close to what I'm running, so perhaps there's hope. I only foresee myself recording a couple shows during the day, and the transcoding of DVD's will probably be done by dvd::rip on my desktop or laptop. Also the myth partition will be a dedicated disk, so hopefully that'll help performance.
Thanks again,
Nick |
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Hobbes-X
l33t
Joined: 04 Feb 2004
Posts: 823
Location: Seattle, WA
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| Posted: Thu Feb 22, 2007 6:23 pm Post subject: |
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| SDNick484 wrote: | | Thank you both for your responses so far; I hope the maintainers consider dropping the frontendonly USE tag as it's definitely misleading. |
Somebody here must want it, since upstream requested the tag be removed too, and even went so far as to disable it a while ago. I'm assuming that it's being patched back in for the ebuild, since the tag is still there. The 'you own both broken pieces' note for it is good, but I think it gives the impression that there is a boolean possibility of serious broken-ness, as opposed to 'I'm silently not installing bits you may want'.
| Quote: | Server performance ought to be interesting. I'm currently not serving any really heavy web pages, and most of my mail is pre-filtered because it's fetched from other remote accounts. I was checking out the readme with mythstreamtv, and the author claims he was initially using it on a P3 1GHz which is fairly close to what I'm running, so perhaps there's hope. I only foresee myself recording a couple shows during the day, and the transcoding of DVD's will probably be done by dvd::rip on my desktop or laptop. Also the myth partition will be a dedicated disk, so hopefully that'll help performance.
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Can't hurt to try  Just as a FYI, there's some table-locking issues being worked out in myth ATM- keyframe info gets written to the database during recording, and it conflicts with the scheduling thread a bit, causing some dropped frames on slower systems. If you're just using the one card, I don't imagine you'd see any problems since scheduling usually only happens at the end of each recording and after a mythfilldatabase. |
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SDNick484
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Joined: 05 Dec 2005
Posts: 231
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| Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 8:23 am Post subject: |
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| Well for those curious, it turns out the Via has enough horsepower to transcode and stream live TV (and likewise pre-recorder shows). I've posted a how-to for streaming to cell phones here: http://www.qusers.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9308 and when I get around to it, I'll write a PHP interface to control channels/files. |
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