[mythtv-users] Disk Space UI

[Ryan Steffes]

On Jan 16, 2008 12:02 AM, Brad DerManouelian <myth at dermanouelian.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Jan 15, 2008, at 8:41 PM, Steve Hodge wrote:
> On Jan 16, 2008 4:37 PM, Phil Bridges <gravityhammer at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > On Jan 15, 2008 10:24 PM, Bryan Murphy <bryan.murphy at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Jan 15, 2008 9:17 PM, Phil Bridges < gravityhammer at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > She can't click through Information Center -> System Status -> Machine
> > > > Status?  That tells you approximately how much free space (in time)
> > > > you have left.
> > >
> > > Spoken by a true Linux geek.  Honestly, no she can't, nor would I expect
> her to.
> >
> > You can expect her to navigate the menus to set up programming
> > schedules, but can't expect her to navigate the menus to see how much
> > space is left?  Wow.
> >
>
> Casual users only learn the stuff they need. They can and will learn very
> complex and unintuitive procedures if they need to. She needs to be able to
> set schedule so she has learned how to do that. But she has no interest or
> need to know how to monitor disk space. So, yes, navigating a couple of
> levels of menus is too much to ask in this case. Asking her to do anything
> at all to monitor the health of the system is probably too much to ask,
> frankly. The system has to notify her when it needs attention.
>
> Cheers,
> Steve
>
>
> Please, please, please add a hard drive. Anywhere on your network. You'll be
> sorry you didn't when Oprah gets expired because you were too cheap to add a
> drive.
>
>


I vote, go for the double whammy.  If you're getting married, you need
to understand right now that everything she does is going to cost you
money anyway, and it's easier to spend the money (as long as you still
have enough to eat at the end of the day) than it is to find other
ways of making her happy.   Secondly, if she doesn't understand disk
space, she probably doesn't understand HD as much as she thinks she
does, so the easiest solution is as follows:

1)  Buy several new, big hard drives.  They are cheaper than ever and
adding a terabyte for $200 is as easy as plugging the thing in,
especially if you run SVN with storage groups.

2)  Set up a transcoding profile specifically for her shows that
crunches the HD down to something reasonable.  Honestly, how clearly
do you need to see Operah.  Set this as the default, and set
transcoding on by default.  Then set up "Autodetect from XXXX" for
your REAL HD shows that you want to keep and set the stuff you
actually want to preserve as HD to use those.  Then set a cronjob that
runs a one liner of mysql to turn on trancsoding for everything,
something like:

mysql mythconverg -umythtv -pmythtv < echo "update record set autotranscode=1"

You'll save a lot of space that way, and can set it to still preserve
the HD quality completely on the shows that are worth it, like sports
or movies, while reducing the HD in a barely noticeable way on other
shows.  You'll, of course, be flirting with danger if she figures it
out; you can try talking her about what you're doing, but doing
something stupid and hoping your wife doesn't notice is an important
part of married life so you may as well practice.


Ry