[mythtv-users] Network Drive Storage Questions and others.

[jack snodgrass]

On 9/17/06, Douglas Wagner <douglasw0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Excelent information, i'll be replying more once I can consolidate and
> process all of whats in here.
>
> As an FYI I am using HighDef, I have a pcHD3000 card in the box, but only
> one tuner.  Don't see a huge need for a second tuner or to be recording more
> than one thing at once, I'm not a huge TV buff, just enough that there are
> some shows every season I just don't want to miss.  I have an NVidia 6200 in
> there so ASSUMABLY XvMC is available, though i'm running a 2.8 HT Intel
> processor and HD is still running slowly for me...not nearly as smooth as
> through my TV and periodicly jumping/tearing...some stations have
> audio/video out of sync issues as well (or did, havn't gotten anything into
> .20 yet to see if that's been fixed).  Any sure way to tell if XvMC is
> running or not?

I did have a P4 3.0 HT CPU for my main desktop. It played HD
fine ( with XvMC ). If I did other things ( like compiles ) the CPU
got bogged down so I upgraded to a AMD 4600+ x86_64 CPU
and moved the 3.0Ghz CPU to my NAS box.

XvMC really lowers the CPU. If you run vlc with XvMC and it's
not available, you don't get video. You can verify it that way.
vlc is part of Video Lan Client

I have a 6600GT with a fan. It runs hot even when it's not
doing any graphics. I'm thinking about swapping in some
non-fan'd video card to see if I can get good graphics
and reduce the heat / noise.

> As to the whole networked file system thing, what's this myth_archive_job.pl
> script?  Is this included within the myth installation (/usr/share/mythtv
> somewhere) or is this a put together thing I can find in the WIKI somewhere?
>  I assume what this thing does is moves the physical data from one drive to
> another drive before playback?

it's in the crontib directory for svn. I assume that the contrib directory
ships with the RPMs.  All it does is a mv from your /mnt/store directory
to another directory... you can give the program a list of directories
and it will find one with enough free space... and it makes a symbolic
link from the new location to /mnt/store and that's all it needs to do.

> I had always expected that I needed to have one huge LVM Partition mounted
> to the frontend for this all to work, am I to understand some of you have
> like /video1, /video2, /video3, partitions out there and simply simlink to
> the various files from your /video partition?  Does MythArchiver work in a
> situation such as this?
>

don't know... I assume it does.....

> Can anyone go a bit more indepth into this kind of setup as to how this
> somewhat works?  Having multiple drives non LVM all running seperate from
> each other storing files would definately be my method of choice (can chose
> to backup a given drive or not depending on the criticality of the data.)
>
> And while i've got some attention here, does anyone have a backup solution
> that doesn't involve "Oh heck, i've just lost 2 years of programming because
> my drive died." :)
>
> --Douglas Wagner
>

backups of HD shows are hard becuase of their size. You can go with
DVD backups ( just write the .mpg to a dvd ) or you can rsync to a second
box that has enough harddrive space.  I have multiple systems an I
rsync data from 'important' directories between the multiple systems. I
also rsync some data to remote systems.

jack