TVE With 2 Houses

#1

Quick question (ok, maybe not so quick)....

I have a Channels DVR setup in home and love it. My mom has 2 houses, one in Florida and a cabin in NC. Since my step-father passed away, I am spending more time in NC helping with the maintenance of the cabin.

She has a YTV account to watch tv at either house (just one account, the locals update when she starts watching TV wherever she is). She has limited bandwidth at the cabin and I was thinking of adding a Pi Server to use TVE instead of app at each TV sucking bandwidth (she's notorious for having 2 TVs on in different rooms with the same channel).

My question is, if I setup the Pi for her mountain cabin, when she leaves to go back to Florida, will she have issues with the Florida TVs not having access to local channels if the Pi is periodically recording things up in NC?

Previously she had DirecTV and was paying close to $200 a month just for TV, and probably $90 for Cox in Florida. Now she just pays $65 for YTV (and internet access at both houses). And when I visit, I've used Channels to watch TV from our home in PA, but that won't work for her because she want's local channels wherever she is at to check the weather.

Thanks,

Jay

#2

I think the locals you get are based on the geographical location of the server, so I don’t think you would have issues with that. Having said that, the bandwidth savings by using Channels rather than YTTV isn’t that significant. If she having issues with her connection with both TVs running YTTV? If not, I’d probably just recommend sticking with YTTV. It works great with locals and is way less “hands on”. Just my two cents.

#3

It would be in this case, if she is has two TVs constantly running on the same channel then the DVR server would cut the bandwidth in half by sharing a single feed and then use the LAN to stream to each TV.

#4

Mac....I'd leave the YTTV app as a backup in case something happens with channels. Right now she's on a 6 MB DSL Modem, so every little bit helps with bandwidth. When we have family there, we could have 3+ TVs running (2 with the same channel and 1 with a different channel). When I'm there and have multiple TVs runnning, I lower the stream down to 1MB from my home DVR Server.

#5

Right, it’s half but that’s still 3-4 Mbps so for most broadband folks that’s not significant. I see now that she has 6 Mbps service so I definitely understand the appeal.