Hi,
I'm very new to TVH and the whole PVR world. I've been looking for a few months now to find a good client server solutions for my new house. Bought a Satellite dish and that's why things changed for me.
I find it very healthy to read such discussions on the product roadmap and architecture. Found this thread the trigger to come into this community.
Adam, I think you have a lot of commitment and faith into this project to put the effort and patience you've shown in this thread. For that I thank you! Hope you have some other good guys in the dev team to back you up sometimes...
Couple of reasons why I find this solution unique and for which I believe has the potencial to grow tremendously:
1 - It's linux, and like or not, Linux is and will continue to be elected OS plattform from which we can create stripped down versions of the OS, tunned to run software that can perform greatly in minimal hardware. OpenElec is a great example.
2 - It's a project purely dedicated on PVR backend, unlike the looks of Media Center, Mediaportal or MythTV where each tries to create their own blended BE/FE solution. Let's be realistic, for an open source project, our work should be contained and sustainable keeping the product at expected quality level. MythTv evolves very slowly because of the maintenance complexity of the whole BE/FE ecosystem. Lesson should be learned there.
3 - The PVR capabilities, configurations (admin is web based) and APIs are not too complex unlike other solutions like MythTV, and provides means of the PVR client developments to keep up with it continuously. XBMC is leading software for media center frontEnd, and the marriage with TVH has happened. This relation will keep this project running for a long time. That's why I'm here!
Thread opinion:
Direct access to the file (TS or MKV doesn't matther) should not be way to handle on client side for the timeshifting or any other functionality. From a software architecture point of view (I'm a software engineer so I feel confortable saying this), the client should not know how the PVR server stores and handles video streams, or either should have to access simultaneously the PVR api as well as a network filesystem (unless the PVR tells him to) at the same time. Would expose the server in a way that future re-design of architecture could compromise client compatibility and also make client development more complex and maintainance an overwelming task. it's much more sustainabled to have a standalone API (doesn't matter if it's HTTP or HTSP) through which you can access every PVR client action.
By the way I have two NMT and would be super to have the DLNA working with TVH. I know it doesn't exist and it's perfectly understandable by the reasons I mentioned above.
Rod