Tvheadend

SORRY IF THIS POST IS TOO LONG, JUST GO DOWN TO THE QUESTION ;).

Goal: stream recorded tv to tablets (no wired connection) all around the house (kitchen, shower?) with little hassle

Attempt #1: I setup mediatomb to real-time transcode recorded tv. You can see the discussion here (https://www.lonelycoder.com/redmine/boards/5/topics/6812). I haven't had time to mess with it yet because I don't have a cheap tablet velcroed to the wall of my kitchen to test the streaming/transcoding while I'm cooking...yet. But it seemed to work last time I tried it. But I started thinking of the different solutions

Why transcode?

• easier to stream
• takes up less space on the hard drive so you can keep a longer

CONSIDERATIONS:
1. high quality
2. easy to stream
3. less space used
4. real-time

Solutions:

• nothing - just stream the file (nfs/samba/etc.)
  - benefits: 1(best quality), 4
  - drawbacks: 2, 3

• dlna/upnp server with transcoding (e.g mediatomb)
  - benefits: 2, 4
  - drawbacks:

• tvheadend built in transcoding:
  - benefits: 2, 4
  - drawbacks: incomplete, hard to setup?

• cron job that does transcoding:
  - benefits: 2, 3
  - drawbacks: 4

I'm considering moving from the first solution to the last. Because:

1) I only have a 400G drive and I do a lot of recording, this will save on loads of space
2) I have an wifi network in an apartment with thick walks and the kitchen is far away, so it's hard to get low-interference/high-bandwidth connections, lowering the native bitrate would make streaming much easier.
3) My viewing habits: I don't really need to watch real-time. I can wait an hour at least, or even a day.

Question:

It would be EXTREMELY easy for me to just make a perl script that searches for files, reads the info (mpeg2 v.s. h264) and then transcodes the file. I could make this run on a cronjob, or just make a little server watch the directory for new files. But a few questions:

1) Has this been done before? Is there some script already out there that I havne't found yet?
2) Are there any specific tvheadend particularities I need to consider? Commerical skipping?
3) Any other suggestions to make my setup or help me reach my goal better would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!