[mythtv-users] is mythtv smart enough to do this (overlap/back-to-back) with recordings?

[Janne Grunau]

On Thursday 27 July 2006 15:50, Peter Schachte wrote:
> >
> > No, this is unfortunately not true.
> > Changing MythTV to handle more than one recording at one time per
> > card is much harder. And your proposal adds only more complexity to
> > this task.
>
> You wouldn't need to do that. You'd just have to get the scheduler 
> to fuse adjacent programs with overlapping start early/end late into
> a single recording.

And how do you create entries for both recordings in the database?

> If you create a separate hard link to the same 
> file for each recording, you get the file system to keep track of how
> many not-yet-deleted programs share the same file, with the file
> finally removed when the last recoding is deleted.  The problem, as
> Steve Hodge pointed out, is that this delays the space reclamation.

This solution is more complex than the clean solution to allow the 
recorders to write to multiple files.
If I record two or more movies back-to-back I wouldn't want to skip over 
all others if I want only see the last one. The system should work for 
a larger number of overlapping recordings.
You can circumvent parental control with this since all recordings are 
accessible through the others. Not that it bothers me.

> Could give the auto-expirer headaches, as it keeps deleting
> recordings and not actually freeing up any space.

It's especially bad since the AutoExpirer would expire recordings that 
doesn't need to be deleted since we gain no additional space. So hard 
links won't work and and mythtv has to know if two recordings share the 
same file. Space calculations in the current form might also not work 
since MythTV adds the sizes of all recordings.

So this solution is not only more complex than a clean solution but it 
has a security hole, is not scaleable (think of ten back-to-back 
recordings and you want only to keep one of them) and has a bad 
usability.

I hope nobody will start to implement this solution. 

I will start implementing a clean solution soon (after 0.20 or if it 
gets cooler in Berlin, whatever comes first).

Janne