Is the Raspberry Pi Model B (the one with 512MB RAM) powerful enough to run a mythtv backend (along with some USB or network storage, of course)? Can it record TV, and can I stream 1080p video from it to a capable frontend?
Evidence from experience preferred, but if you think you can give an educated guess based on the specs, that would also be helpful.
The HDHomeRun stream would be already encoded as an mpeg stream so there is no need to encode on the RPi. I suspect where you would run into problems would be the MySQL database updates that MythTV does for seek tables and program guide information, especially if you are using USB or network connected storage since the RPi connects to the network through USB (the ethernet chip is USB connected on the board if I recall correctly). Essentially you would have the mpeg stream from the HDHomeRun coming in, the disk reads for the recording you are watching coming in, and then the mpeg stream going out to your frontend AND MySQL database queries trying to access storage all through the poor RPi USB.
I'm not saying it can't be done, but I suspect you can't record more than 1 show at a time, and might not be able to watch and record without issues.
Can I run mythbackend on Raspberry Pi? A definitive YES, I have mythtv raspbian running on a Pi. http://help-it.cc/howto/MythRaspbian.pdf
my (educated) guess: encoding the stream as h264 should be possible since it is supported by the hardware. other encondings will never be able to be done in realtime since the processor uis just to weak for this kind of application. you should look out for linux distributions that have a kernel supporting hardeware encoding. but as mentioned in the comments: this stream had to come via ethernet, so make sure thats possible.
