Re: RFC: I need coax in every room vs. distribute TV via network

[Peer Oliver Schmidt <posde@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Kim,

thanks for your detailed post.
[..]

> I'd probably want to keep a single coax run to get basic live TV, if
> only so that when the mother-in-law[1] comes to visit, the telly works
> as expected.  Or perhaps for radio (FM, DTT or DAB), if you're not
> interested in doing the whole-house audio thing.

in Germany there is no longer over the air TV reception. Everything has
been changed to DVB-T (well, not 100% accurate, as you still are able to
receive 3 channels over the air). So it is either, you have a
DVB-T-receiver, or a DVB-S-receiver. Or in my position, I have a
"thing"
that looks like a receiver, but connects to a central VDR system. That
is the beauty of the MediaMVP. Even my wife is able to use it, as for
her, it is just a regular receiver with additional functionality.

> There might be scalability issues, too, if you've got a large number
of
> televisions or family members.  How many TV streams can the network
(or
> more likely the server) handle without issue?

Enough, it seems. The average transfer rate of most DVB-S channels is
around 2.5MBit/s, so it takes a while until the PCI bus is saturated.

> If you've got a large family, you're going to need more
> tuners and storage to be able to record everyone's programmes.  You'll
> also need backups so that you don't get lynched when the inevitable
bug
> or hardware failure takes the whole thing offline.  How do you stop
> people accidentally deleting each other's programmes?  How do you
> persuade the resident luddite to stop worrying and learn to love the
> scheduler, as opposed to tying up tuners with live TV.

Regarding the deleting, you can't really do a lot about it. And about
backup, well, I don't think a lot of stuff on the TV is meant to be
stored forever. If anyone has the wish to save something for later, the
programm can be easily transferred onto a DVD.

With regards to the tying up the tuners, this is not really a problem,
as each tuner card can service all programms available on a given
transponder in parallel.

> I don't think any of this is unresolvable, but I can see how it could
> start to become impractical.

Luckily for me, it has not yet become impractical. Granted, we are only
four people, but if we should ever have a problem with tyed up tuners,
or not enough disc space, we will just throw another tuner card and/or
bigger harddrive into the system.
--
Best regards

Peer Oliver Schmidt
PGP Key ID: 0x83E1C2EA


--
Best regards

Peer Oliver Schmidt
PGP Key ID: 0x83E1C2EA




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