[mapleleaf]

I and 4 of my friends living in separate houses have decided to build 2 or 3 dedicated BTV servers with 10 analog tuners in each (no HDTV just yet). We plan to utilize our existing 1 GB private LAN we have build few years back for gaming purposes and don’t use so much anymore. These servers should be able to accommodate 20 BTVLink clients initially with prospect of going up to 60 concurrent users. We plan to build the whole bunch of silent low cost living room computers with BTVLink license for each. Each one of us will have from 3 to 5 client boxes at home. This setup seems to make more sense than each of us having separate BTV server to maintain at home and recording same shows simultaneously when we can use preexisting tuners to record different channels. We plan to balance the load on servers and that is why we need 2 or 3 of them. Now this is where I need the advice… We can share pre-recorded shows between multiple servers by creating number of video folders on each server that are essentially mapped shared folders on other computers.

1. The problem is that we cannot watch the live show being recorded at another server than the one we are connected to. We have to wait for the show to stop being recorded before being able to watch it.
2. Other problem is that we still have to record the same show multiple times simultaneously on different computers because our interconnected servers are unable to balance the workload and use resources (tuners) efficiently when more of us users decide to select the same show to be recorded trough our BTV link machines.
3. We need to have frequent discussions before we can delete recorded show after everyone had a chance to watch it.

I know that problem 1 and 2 could be solved by having just one BTV server shared among all of use, however, I am very doubtful that we could build reliable server with 20+ tuners (PCI & USB) and the machine would be powerful enough to serve 20 BTVLinks at once. The problem # 3 seems unsolvable presently, unless server would delete certain show only after every BTVLink client would have sent delete command or after certain number of days automatically.

So the question is how do you, the users with big families, deal with problem # 3? And those of you with more than one BTV server, how did you setup your system?