Dual Le Potato Cluster?

Avid4D

I have been an RPi user running LibreElec/TVHeadEnd Server as a PVR, but finding lately it struggles when 3 or more HD channels are being recorded simultaneously so I have purchased two Le Potato's in the hope it will have the CPU power required. Hoping they arrive soon!

One Le Potato will be my new PVR and the other a general Kodi media centre. However, what I really want to know is can I cluster two Le Potato's together and attach two TV Tuners to each board to reduce the load on each? They would both need to save recordings to the same attached USB hard drive, and preferably share one ethernet connection and present one IP Address I can point my other Kodi media centres to. I am happy to run seperate images of LibreElec/CoreElec on each Le Potato if required. Can it be done, or am I asking too much???

JenMcQuade

We're sort of in the same boat, though ours is mostly for digital signage and monitoring. We just got our first LePotato last week, so it will be some time before we can test clustering.

We're in process of developing Docker supported ARM64 images, and we just had our first successful build (no validations yet) on our "Project ADAN", which is Aarch64 Docker Alpine Nginx". You can see that here (eventually will be migrated to a GitHub company/group): https://github.com/jonmcquade/docker-intranet/tree/master/dns/docker-php-nginx

With this build of Nginx, we have RTMP and FFmpeg. And Nginx .conf can be setup for upstream load balancing. So, you could have a NAS hard disk with two Le Potatos writing their own captures, or determining based on load, which should handle each capture. That's all theoretical use, though. We're still maybe another month away from validating stream capabilities -- the Docker image is the backbone of our Intranet software.

Checkout the Nginx RTMP Module on Github too -- this is baked into our image and is how we'll be doing local Web casting, alongside VOD.
https://github.com/arut/nginx-rtmp-module

Hope this helps. You'll find lots of documentation online, for configuring Nginx as a streaming service and reverse proxy to your network resources.

loverpi

@Avid4D Do you know where the bottleneck in your current system is? The Raspberry Pi uses a USB hub that splits off to four ports plus Ethernet so 35MB/s is shared between everything. Le Potato only has 100Mb Ethernet (12MB/s) but it has two USB channels which means 70MB/s bandwidth. As long as your final network throughput is less than 12MB/s, Le Potato will have more bandwidth or else you would have to plug in a USB gigabit dongle to double the throughput of the Raspberry Pi.