[mythtv-users] "Normal" storage requirements?

[Ray Olszewski]

At 11:33 AM 6/4/2003 -0500, Ben Davis wrote:
>This is more of a poll to see what kind of storage you all have on your 
>myth boxes, and also the total amount of recording hours you've got, 
>whether it be on one box or several boxes networked together.
>
>TIVO boasts being able to record up to 80 hours.  What would it take to do 
>80 hours on a Myth Box?  (I guess this would also depend on compression 
>methods used)

Actually, TiVo's "up to" phrasing is a signal that on a TiVo, it also 
depends on the compression (quality level) chosen.

MPEG4 encoding on a Myth host can range from roughly 600 MB/hr to 2000 MB 
(2 GB)/hr. From that, you (or anyone) can do the storage arithmetic. 
(Someone else will have to help with the other capture formats -- RTJPEG 
and MPEG2/ivtv.) I'm pretty sure that Myth's lowest quality (associated 
with those MPEG4 numbers) is far better than the quality level TiVo assumes 
for 80 hours ... but I don't own a TiVo so have not been able to do 
like-to-like comparisons, so that comment is more a guess than a firm opinion.

My Myth host has 120 GB of storage (/home/mythtv) on hdc (it has a second, 
small hard drive on hda that holds everything except /home) . The one I'm 
building for a colleague has 180 GB (set up the same way as my host). So 
far, I only use these for short-term, time-shifting storage; I haven't done 
the work yet to transform Myth captures into edited, "keeper" video. Each 
of these hosts has room for 2 more drives, when money permits and the need 
arises.

My non-Myth recording host has roughly 450 GB of video storage, spread over 
3 drives (added incrementally), holding DivX captures done at about 500 MB/hr.

There is no such thing as "normal" here, though. It all depends on your 
purpose (and the size of your wallet).