one server + many clients on the same machine

[mba]

Hi there

I have been playing around with an idea for MP.
A friend of mine wants a htpc system in his house running on 4-8 tv sets, he asked me if I had any ideas, so of course I recommended MP to him. I explained how it works and showed him my installation. I then suggested that he installed the tve3 on one of his servers, added 4 tv cards, loaded his music and his photos onto it and then placed a client next to each tv set. He then looked at me and asked "why would I have one client pr. tvset when I have this powerful server in my basement?". It then hit me why can't you run multiple MP clients on the same pc, most modern graphic cards has multihead support already? I asked once or twice on IRC and got some answers that it wouldn't work, MP wasn't designed for it and hardware acceleration wouldn't work on two heads at the same time. This I had to see for myself, I thought the idea was just too nice to let go before I was 100% sure it wouldn't work.
So I fired up my Visual Express and began looking at the code.

I removed the check where MP tests for multiple running versions and compiled it. Afterwards I installed the tv server plugin in the install folder. I then copied the compiled MP into two duplicate folders. I configured each copy to run on each head of my NVidia 6600LE graphics card and set them to go fullscreen and removed check in exclusive mode, and executed both. So far so good. I now had MP running on two displays. I first tried playing music from both, ran like a charm. I only have one soundcard so both audio streams came out of the same speakerset. I then tried the tv part, which connected to my livingroom htpc running tve3. Voila! I now had live tv running on two screens. I have attached two photos of my succes :-). When running both in fullscreen I had some stutter on the one instance that didn't have focus at that moment, but I'm still hopeful as I was running this on an old 1.67ghz Athlon.


This isn't a final solution and I'm not even sure that it will ever function properly - it was just a proof of concept as there are many things which doesn't work as it should. I would just like to get some responses before I continued, specifically from anybody who knows that this will never function properly because ....

I have three things which I have to solve before this is a valid solution:

1. MP is very agressively using CPU resources, like scrolling the EPG on one instance causes tv to stutter on both instances. Going into my tv the first time (where the epg is transferred from the server) also causes this to happen. This could partial come from the fact that I'm running this setup on an old'ish Athlon 1.67ghz. I assume this could be way better on a modern dualcore.

2. It seems that the tv server keeps track of clients by their ip adress? Because when I turn on tv in both instances, and stop it in only one, both tv streams are stopped. Changing channel on the second instance causes channel change in both, where I would assume that the first one had priority and wouldn't allow the change. It seems that the server just sees the IP adress and says "hey its ok, the requests originates from the same client!"

3. I would like to find out if its possible to differentiate between the inputs from multiple usb Microsoft MCE remotes. Where each remote controls each instance of MP.

Any comments would be appreciated!


regards
Martin

[jadz]

Have you made any more progress on this concept? I'm of the same mind that I would rather have one machine that is serving content to the multiple displays in my house and don't really want to one high powered machine for each display in the house.

[mba]

hi jadz

as there was zero interest for the idea and no response on my questions I dropped it again. I had some unanswered questions which I needed information on before I could go any further, such as using multiple remotes and being able to differentiate between them.

regards
Martin