I’ve got that new tablet that I’ve been writing about, the Teclast X16, and I want to be able to “watch TV” on it. No, not live TV (except for the occasional truly live event, I have little use for live TV) but shows that have been recorded on MythTV. The shows are on the server and I could stream them from there using a MythTV Android client. And that does work. But if I can avoid needing a network connection, I’ll be better off and most importantly, then my TV can travel with me.
The “tPad” does communicate through Bluetooth and I could use a BT file transfer to load files to it. But I really don’t want to struggle with those kinds of connections. I could also do a USB transfer which skips the flakey BT connection but then I still have to worry about filling up the “drive”. I’d rather use the SD card slot on the tPad to store the stuff to watch. (Technically, it is a Micro SD and it is labeled as TF. Since I’ll be using an SD adapter to write to it from the MythTV server, for the rest of this post I’ll just refer to it as an SD card.) And rather than stuff in an empty card and then transfer stuff to the tPad and store it on the SD card, way easier to just put the SD card into my MythTV server and drop the files on the card there. Sure, there’s an element of sneaker-net involved. But this isn’t something I’m going to do daily and it really isn’t too much trouble to stuff a card into the front panel of the MythTV server. Besides, this way, if the SD card fills up, I know I have enough TV to last me a good long while and don’t have to worry about breaking the tPad functionality by accidentally filling up the main “drive”. The only real hard part was setting up MythTV to automate getting the recordings to the SD card.