"In theory, the best way to really feed a DMS for live streams is to implement the client side of createObject/destroyObject and the UPnP discovery protocol but not all DMS support it as it's an optional feature. This itself could be done first by an external dedicated program providing all the needed information are exposed and accessible (get playlist, get mimetype for streams, get streams name and streams URL)."
RB - Who would be the client? The TVH? or the XMBC? Both have different architecture implications. One common implication is the additional server software put in between the moment I press the button and the moment I actually see the channel. Besides refreshing the playlist, the DMS will also refresh internal database and correspondent memory indexes associated with the files, as well as parse the file and its properties to categorize it.
"The other way is to make the DMS find the resources itself by creating the playlist with relevant URL as a file in the recordings directory..."
RB - Who would be responsible for doing this? Again you're talking about more software to blend the PVR and the DMS as a single Live TV solution.
"Like commercial DMS do..."
RB - the word "commercial" sounds very wrong associated with TVH or XMBC. First of all, I don't believe people will ever want to pay and install software just to resolve TVH time shifting or any other feature. Secondly I very much like to see which kind of Linux commercial DMS exists that would support what you are suggesting that could be done. Could you give an example?
I can see you are very convict this could be the way to do it. Don't want to convince you otherwise, believe me, I would be one of "your" best customers since I have two popcorn hour and was desperate to put some live TV on these clients.
DMS will always take some (needless) memory and processor usage on the servers. I turned off my DMS from my QNAP that has 3 TB and usual re-indexation was taking CPU to 100%. Now I'm very happy with my raspberry pi xmbc client accessing the files through NFS, not having to wait for file publishs, and storing media info locally from Internet (loading media info from server side is horrible when you want big mosaico HD views!). Besides that, DLNA doesn't allow to load subtitles from file while file share does. Now I'm giving some boring speach, sorry! :)
But I'm still really not convinced that we would need a more complex client and server side solution just to fix the Time shifting or any other missing feature! There should be more elegant and SOA way to do it using merely TVH and XBMC.
I might as well tel yo what I want to achieve:
1 Mini PC with TVH connected to the DVB-S USB card and also serving as living room XBMC client
2 Rasp Pi with Openelec for other two TVs. My TVH should be accessed through PVR client. Now I haven't tested this yet...only tested with XBMC with the Mini Pc nd a wireless connected windows laptop which performed very well. Need to be sure after installing Openelec and getting the Rasp codecs that the rasp will be the right client for the job.
If anyone sees any problem with this configuration would appreciate your comments!
Tnks
Rod