Tvheadend

I am in a comparable situation, luckily I have in both locations 100 mbit FTTH, so the streaming is not a problem.

I have been using the XBMC-PVR media center system which allows multiple TV backends like TVHeadend, MythTV, VDR, ...
Unfortunately this does not yet allow multiple servers of the same backend-type. if this would be implemented then we have a nice solution for our problem, at least for XBMC-PVR. Since it is open-source it could be easily adapted for some standalone solution if desired.

To keep TVHeadend lightweight I think front-ends are the most appropriate place to implement this kind of functionality.

Djuri,

Yes, I've been thinking about this since I opened this issue, and am coming to the same conclusion - that most of this can be done by the client. Although when I discussed it in IRC, people seemed open to the idea of tvh instances communicating between themselves.

Your situation is easier, as your bandwidth means you can just treat local and remote servers the same. Something that may be better implemented inside tvh is the "remote recording" - where a recording is made on a remote server and then transferred slower than real time afterwards.

But this is related to another feature I want to see in tvh - importing of external recordings. If I do that, then I could script this transfer without changing anything inside tvh.

I'll see how things develop...

+1, bump. :)

A HTSP client in tvh would enable for some really sweet setups

A possible workaround would be to use vtuners.
[[https://code.google.com/p/vtuner/]]
but then the recordings wouldn't be managed between the servers at all and possibly a lot of unnecessary bandwidth would be used.

Http input is way to bugged for that, the code locks up the tvheadend process sometimes when a http input is started.

Tvheadend also has all kinds of limits, for example it cant cope with auto switching source if one input dies, and you have 2 inputs mapped to that channel. Or even try to restart the http thread without the client having to stop start the channel, and if 2 clients is on the same channel whats the chance of that happening, none :)

wget + mbuffer + tsplay works quite good, used like this :

wget t1 -T3 -qO http://linktochannel | mbuffer -q | tsplay -stdin -buffer 256 -i 127.0.0.1 239.0.0.1:5501

-t1 means only try once, -T3 means timeout if no data within 3 seconds, this way you can script it to have multiple sources and jump to another if no input on the first one.
mbuffer is a little buffer tool that prevents tsplay from halting wget.

The scripting part is pretty simple make a script that reads the tvheadend logfile in realtime and starts / stops channels on the multicast addresses you use within tvheadend.

Tvheadend and these simple tools scales pretty good, on decent i7 hardware you can easy be running 100 sd channels, or about 500 mbit mpegts processing.