Re: [mythtv-users] Setting up MythTV in a wierd way ...
On Thu, 6 Jan 2005, M. Barnabas Luntzel wrote: before you get too deep in this, and maybe I dont know about sun blades (definitely dont know much) but is this a sun machine with SPARC processor(s)? Has anybody installed this mess on a sun sparc, maybe sparc linux (solaris seems unlikely)? if there are success stories of mythtv on sun hardware, I will be pleasantly surprised. then again maybe you just want to process the video files on this box. still do not see how you'll get this stuff to run. under x86 emulation, its going to be dog ass slow (which is pretty slow). On Jan 5, 2005, at 3:50 PM, Bear Paw wrote: My roomate scored some equipment at a .com auction ... a LCD projector, some SCSI hard drives, some LCD monitors ... but the cream of the crop is a Sun Blade 1000. It has 2 36Gig FC drives, it has one SCSI connector open so we can throw a system disk in there. it has 4 PCI slots and we were going to try to use that for recording/encoding. It has room for one more drive in the case ... I guess we could use an ext. SCSI cage ... Keep in mind that Sun hardware is pretty crappy price/performance ratio compared to a modern PC. They're a tank and will run solidly forever, but they're not that fast CPU-wise. IIRC a blade 1000 is around a 600-1000MHz ultrasparc and would probably run linux quite well. Whether or not you could get all the mythtv stuff to compile with the endian issues is another issue. You'll also lose a lot of the spiffy optimizations (MMX, 3Dnow, etc) so it will probably perform slower than a comparable PC, even. If you just wanted to hang the filesystem/database off it, it'd probably work fine. If you want IVTV hardware support like for a backend, it's probably possible, but likely will take some hacking. If you want to crunch to DivX, I think you're SOL since it's a binary-only codec. XVid has source so you might have a chance there. In any event, it seems like significantly more trouble than it's worth for a 1GHz machine. If it was a fire-breathing quad processor or had 1/2 TB worth of storage it might be more interesting. That was my conclusion when I tried using a BW G3 450MHz for a frontend. Although the box was much cuter and cleaner than a beige PC, a comparable PC (600MHz PII-PIII) is *much* more supported. Nothing more than tweak/hack value, really. -Cory * * Cory Papenfuss* * Electrical Engineering candidate Ph.D. graduate student * * Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University * * ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
[mythtv-users] Setting up MythTV in a wierd way ...
Greetings peoples ... I'm really new at MythTV but I've been tracking its progress for some time. My question has to do making a really weird setup. System one: 4 tuner cards, records and encodes shows and transfers them to fileserver System two: File server, this will hold the MythTV backend and dish out files to all the frontends. System 3-N: MythTV frontends What we really want is for SysOne to cache the files to its harddrives then transfer them to SysTwo. Is this doable or should we just try to put it all on one system? Thanks Bear Paw ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: [mythtv-users] Setting up MythTV in a wierd way ...
I'd combine 1 and 2 into a master backend that the frontends connect to. And no, this is not a weird way to use MythTV... Josh On Wed, 5 Jan 2005 14:24:24 -0800, Bear Paw [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Greetings peoples ... I'm really new at MythTV but I've been tracking its progress for some time. My question has to do making a really weird setup. System one: 4 tuner cards, records and encodes shows and transfers them to fileserver System two: File server, this will hold the MythTV backend and dish out files to all the frontends. System 3-N: MythTV frontends What we really want is for SysOne to cache the files to its harddrives then transfer them to SysTwo. Is this doable or should we just try to put it all on one system? Thanks Bear Paw ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: [mythtv-users] Setting up MythTV in a wierd way ...
Is there a reason for caching? How about set up a NFS share from System two to System one then just have System one record directly on System two. Dan Littlejohn +++ On Wed, 5 Jan 2005 14:24:24 -0800, Bear Paw [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Greetings peoples ... I'm really new at MythTV but I've been tracking its progress for some time. My question has to do making a really weird setup. System one: 4 tuner cards, records and encodes shows and transfers them to fileserver System two: File server, this will hold the MythTV backend and dish out files to all the frontends. System 3-N: MythTV frontends What we really want is for SysOne to cache the files to its harddrives then transfer them to SysTwo. Is this doable or should we just try to put it all on one system? Thanks Bear Paw ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: [mythtv-users] Setting up MythTV in a wierd way ...
My roomate scored some equipment at a .com auction ... a LCD projector, some SCSI hard drives, some LCD monitors ... but the cream of the crop is a Sun Blade 1000. It has 2 36Gig FC drives, it has one SCSI connector open so we can throw a system disk in there. it has 4 PCI slots and we were going to try to use that for recording/encoding. It has room for one more drive in the case ... I guess we could use an ext. SCSI cage ... Greetings peoples ... I'm really new at MythTV but I've been tracking its progress for some time. My question has to do making a really weird setup. System one: 4 tuner cards, records and encodes shows and transfers them to fileserver System two: File server, this will hold the MythTV backend and dish out files to all the frontends. System 3-N: MythTV frontends What we really want is for SysOne to cache the files to its harddrives then transfer them to SysTwo. Is this doable or should we just try to put it all on one system? Thanks Bear Paw I'm not quite clear what the goal is, just to use 1 machine as the backend and have it write to a file server? You can do that by using NFS, why do you want to cache it first? I'm not sure if it is possible to do the cacheing, but it might be possible using rsync or something similiar. ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: [mythtv-users] Setting up MythTV in a wierd way ...
Disk I/O shouldn't be a problem, all disks we are planning on using are either FC (we have 2x36GB drives) or SCSI320 (we have like a box of them) and we want to use a Sun Blade 1000 (2x900MHz uSPARCs with dual PCI buses and FC controller). I think I'll tell my roommate that we need it all on one system and just get an Ext. cage for the SCSI drives. I want to avoid using NFS because of bandwidth. We have 5 people living here all with Interweb addictions ... Bear Paw wrote: Greetings peoples ... I'm really new at MythTV but I've been tracking its progress for some time. My question has to do making a really weird setup. System one: 4 tuner cards, records and encodes shows and transfers them to fileserver System two: File server, this will hold the MythTV backend and dish out files to all the frontends. System 3-N: MythTV frontends What we really want is for SysOne to cache the files to its harddrives then transfer them to SysTwo. Is this doable or should we just try to put it all on one system? It's good that you are thinking about two server machines but you may be thinking about it the wrong way around. It is not a good thing to put lots of cards in the same system. It isn't just a matter of having enough CPU but there is PCI bandwidth, disk cache, IDE bus contention, memory, and kernel scheduler time slices that the recorders need to compete for. One card per system is best, two is usually acceptable. More than that is possible but not beneficial. You should think about putting cards 1 and 4 in one machine then 2 and 3 in the other. Put local disks in both machines although you could put all you big disks in the machine with card 1 and NFS mount for the other machine but this is not as efficient in several ways. -- bjm ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: [mythtv-users] Setting up MythTV in a wierd way ...
I'm no seasoned pro myself but I would go with the external scsi solution. You can usually find a scsi card and an external enclosure for a steal somewhere. Like if you happened to work at a company that kept old equipment... :) Another solution would maybe be to isolate the file server from your network with just either a crossover cable or a small hub connecting it to your master backend. You would of course need 2 nics in the master. I'm not sure how well it would work with livetv if you went from backend---fileserver---backend---frontend. Might have to make sure you got a lot of bandwidth between the file server and backend. Good luck. --- Bear Paw [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Disk I/O shouldn't be a problem, all disks we are planning on using are either FC (we have 2x36GB drives) or SCSI320 (we have like a box of them) and we want to use a Sun Blade 1000 (2x900MHz uSPARCs with dual PCI buses and FC controller). I think I'll tell my roommate that we need it all on one system and just get an Ext. cage for the SCSI drives. I want to avoid using NFS because of bandwidth. We have 5 people living here all with Interweb addictions ... Bear Paw wrote: Greetings peoples ... I'm really new at MythTV but I've been tracking its progress for some time. My question has to do making a really weird setup. System one: 4 tuner cards, records and encodes shows and transfers them to fileserver System two: File server, this will hold the MythTV backend and dish out files to all the frontends. System 3-N: MythTV frontends What we really want is for SysOne to cache the files to its harddrives then transfer them to SysTwo. Is this doable or should we just try to put it all on one system? It's good that you are thinking about two server machines but you may be thinking about it the wrong way around. It is not a good thing to put lots of cards in the same system. It isn't just a matter of having enough CPU but there is PCI bandwidth, disk cache, IDE bus contention, memory, and kernel scheduler time slices that the recorders need to compete for. One card per system is best, two is usually acceptable. More than that is possible but not beneficial. You should think about putting cards 1 and 4 in one machine then 2 and 3 in the other. Put local disks in both machines although you could put all you big disks in the machine with card 1 and NFS mount for the other machine but this is not as efficient in several ways. -- bjm ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users __ Do you Yahoo!? Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone. http://mobile.yahoo.com/maildemo ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: [mythtv-users] Setting up MythTV in a wierd way ...
On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 05:00:00PM -0800, Matt Picker wrote: I'm no seasoned pro myself but I would go with the external scsi solution. You can usually find a scsi card and an external enclosure for a steal somewhere. Like if you happened to work at a company that kept old equipment... :) Another solution would maybe be to isolate the file server from your network with just either a crossover cable or a small hub connecting it to your master backend. You would of course need 2 nics in the master. I'm not sure how well it would work with livetv if you went from backend---fileserver---backend---frontend. Might have to make sure you got a lot of bandwidth between Be aware that something as high performance as the scsi drives may not be the right choice. The best choice for video tends to be slow drives, 4500 rpm if you can get them, though today 5400 rpm is your common choice. Unless you are serving tons and tons of people like a dorm-server. Of course if you have drives around, you may decide to use what you have. But even then, sometimes not. 36gb drives are not that valuable today with disk space costing 40 cents/gigabyte. Many other things such as your time, but more importantly noise, heat and power are more important than the $15 a 36gb drive is worth. Consider that a drive, drawing 20 watts and on 24x7 wll use 175 kwh in a year. In California, at 13 cents/kwh that's almost $23 in electricity to keep that drive running. Plus all the noise and heat. In other words, it's far more worth it to pick up a 200gb drive for $80. Extra IDE controllers are cheap. Your old SCSIs may be more reliable but they are also older. HDTV needs about 18 megabits of bandwidth, even ancient ATA/33 is 33 megaBYTES of bandwidth. NFS will not be an issue over gigabit ether (getting cheap) and not even over 100mbit if you are just doing regular TV and not so much HDTV. You probably don't want to send more than 3 HDTV streams over 100mbit ethernet. ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: [mythtv-users] Setting up MythTV in a wierd way ...
If I understand what you are shooting for then the
good soultion would be a SAN with a shared filesystem, OpenGFS
for example. It might look something like:
- /{Fe1}
|MBe|---{SAN Array/OpenGFS}---|NFS Server|---{LAN}-{Fe2}
- \{Fe3} etc
The advantage here is that the MBe need do nothing
but record the shows to the SAN (well, and handle the DB,
though you could put the MySQL DB on the NFS Server as well).
Meanwhile, the NFS Server can read the shows off of the SAN
without impacting the system I/O of the MBe. The Frontends
will all spool off of the NFS Server (provided of course
that you use NFS mounts and don't let mythtv stream from
the MBe).
Ideally though what you would want to do for
maximum performance is this:
{SBe/Fe1}\ /{SBe/Fe3}
---{SAN Array/OpenGFS}---
{Sbe/Fe2}/ \{MBe}
In this case, the Frontends are all Slave backends
and each has one capture card. The MBe may have one capture
card or none. In this configuration, each Fe will simply use
whatever capture device is available. And LiveTV will use the
local device if it is free. All of the Be's will record and
read from the SAN disk without impacting any other system's I/O.
This solution will scale very nicely to the limit of your
SAN hardware.
Yup, serious overkill. Cool, but overkill.
-poul
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