Good morning. Be gentle, I'm extremely new to XBMC but am impressed in what I'm seeing - I recently made the jump from WMC when Microsoft showed their commitment to it in Win 8 (or lack of). Sadly, I suspect it's on its way out so I wanted to evaluate new solutions - XBMC won.
Here's my setup:
Server: WMC with ServerWMC
Client TVs: OpenELEC with ServerWMC Client
Now before anyone wonders why I made the server Windows-based, there were a few reasons:
-Easy setup of Netflix/Amazon to all clients (PlayON)
-I couldn't get any form of reliable EPG to work - ultimately too difficult to set up in comparison to ServerWMC
-OpenELEC didn't like my server's graphics card - its a server, so low graphics, but high enough that WMC looks right (motion graphics - not jumpy).
One thing WMC did very well was optimize tuner usage. If a channel was being recorded and a user wanted to also watch that channel, they would be added to that one stream, not use a second tuner. Sadly, ServerWMC/XBMC doesn't seem to do that - it just makes the request and the channel is streamed. That I can live with, as tuners are cheap these days, but some sort of logic like that would have been great.
However, the other thing that I'd love to get worked out that even WMC couldn't do because of it's "remote desktop" foundation is to have a tuner be used directly by the client requesting it (no transcoding or relaying). My tuners are network-attached (HD HomeRun). They also support being accessed from any client and negotiating which tuner to use. I'd love to be able to load the driver on each machine, but still have the networking in place to share the EPG and scheduled recordings. All recordings would be executed by the server, but Live TV would be executed solely by the client making the request, and would access the tuner directly.
Can anyone think of a way to pull this off? I'm still learning on this platform, but I'm already convinced that just about anything you want to do with it, you can if you know how, and because of that it's won me over.
Here's my setup:
Server: WMC with ServerWMC
Client TVs: OpenELEC with ServerWMC Client
Now before anyone wonders why I made the server Windows-based, there were a few reasons:
-Easy setup of Netflix/Amazon to all clients (PlayON)
-I couldn't get any form of reliable EPG to work - ultimately too difficult to set up in comparison to ServerWMC
-OpenELEC didn't like my server's graphics card - its a server, so low graphics, but high enough that WMC looks right (motion graphics - not jumpy).
One thing WMC did very well was optimize tuner usage. If a channel was being recorded and a user wanted to also watch that channel, they would be added to that one stream, not use a second tuner. Sadly, ServerWMC/XBMC doesn't seem to do that - it just makes the request and the channel is streamed. That I can live with, as tuners are cheap these days, but some sort of logic like that would have been great.
However, the other thing that I'd love to get worked out that even WMC couldn't do because of it's "remote desktop" foundation is to have a tuner be used directly by the client requesting it (no transcoding or relaying). My tuners are network-attached (HD HomeRun). They also support being accessed from any client and negotiating which tuner to use. I'd love to be able to load the driver on each machine, but still have the networking in place to share the EPG and scheduled recordings. All recordings would be executed by the server, but Live TV would be executed solely by the client making the request, and would access the tuner directly.
Can anyone think of a way to pull this off? I'm still learning on this platform, but I'm already convinced that just about anything you want to do with it, you can if you know how, and because of that it's won me over.
