[mythtv-users] mytharchive

[robbinsck1 at gmail.com]

Happy Saturday Night!


I'm trying to use mytharchive to create a DVD copy of an episode of a show so my wife can play it in her Classroom.  I'm running into trouble, however, because I have my system setup with a dedicated backend (which stores all the recordings locally), and several remote frontends.  It seems that mytharchive needa a 'local' copy of the file to process it, but that's not possible with my setup (I thought of temporarily installing mythfrontend on the backend server, but I don't have a dvd burner on that machine, so I'm stuck there too).  I looked it up in the wiki, and it reccommends the following:
 

"MythArchive reports that files are not available locally
 
MythTV usually streams video if you have a separate frontend and backend. MythArchive cannot use streamed video: it needs to be able to access the file locally. This can be accomplished by exporting the directory containing your recordings via NFS <http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/NFS>  and then adding the mountpoint to the frontend's Storage Group <http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Storage_Groups> ." 
So now my problem lies in how do I create a "frontend storage group" that I can point my frontend to.  I have no problem with NFS, and I have mapped the "recordings" folder to a local folder on my frontend machine but I'm not sure how to create a "frontend storage group" specifically.  I konw how to create a storage group for the backend, but not for the frontend.  So how can I trick mytharchive into thinking my recordings folder is on the local machine?  I suppose I could create a storage group for the backend that would make the backend connect via NFS to the share on my frontend (which is actually an NFS share from a physical drive on the Backend) but that seems like it could create a black hole or something worse (and seems incredibly hoaky besides).  
 
Has anyone else out there managed to use mytharchve to make a DVD from a recording file that is stored on a remote backend?  Is there any non-stupid way of doing it that doesn't involve major hacking? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.  
 
Thanks,
Josh


Yes, it can be done. I do it all the time, you will need to make the location of the recordings a writable NFS share then mount it with the frontend in the same directory structure. 

So when you goto for example. /var/lib/mythtv/recordings on the frontend it will have the identical content as the backend. Because it is. 
In other words if you recordings are in /var/lib/mythtv/recordings on your server. 

Then mount your frontend like this...

Sudo mount serverip:/var/lib/mythtv/recordings /var/lib/mythtv/recordings. 

You can also edit your /etc/fstab file so it auto mounts on boot.  

Beware if you have any recordings in your frontends /var/lib/mythtv/recordings directory they won't be accessible anymore.