[mythtv-users] Building a library.....chews up space!!

[Another Sillyname]

On 28/03/2011, Raymond Wagner <raymond at wagnerrp.com> wrote:
> On 3/28/2011 01:23, Another Sillyname wrote:
>> I've been building my Library now for about 5 years and it recently
>> hit 7TB of storage for assorted Movies and TV Shows. Over the last 2-3
>> years more and more are HD recordings transcoded down to x264 720p,
>> but these are usually about 25%-35% of the original broadcast space
>> requirements.
>
> Transcoding to h264 really just isn't worth it.  The original recordings
> are going to be 6-7GB/hr.  Losslessly cutting commercials out will drop
> that to 4-5GB/hr, but will take all of 5 minutes of your own time, and
> about as much on the backend.  On the other hand, re-compressing that to
> an equivalent quality h264 video is only going to get you to around
> 2GB/hr, and will take around 6hr/hr on a modern quad core.
>
> With 2TB drives being readily available for $70 online, you're trading
> $0.10 in hard drive capacity for $0.10 in power consumption, and you're
> wasting a whole lot of your own and your CPU time to do so.  You may as
> well just skip the whole process, and buy whatever storage you need to
> store the content as-is.
>
> If GPU transcoding, or the hardware encoders on the new Sandy Bridge
> processors, becomes available at some point, the balance may shift.  For
> now, just buy the hard drives, and leave transcoding for support of
> mobile or embedded devices with limited codec support.
>
>> Are there any tricks and tips you use for indexing/reference?  for
>> example I split my library into Movies and TV, then into alphabetic
>> subgroups i.e. 0-C, D-E, F-K where each group has about 100
>> subdirectories.
>
> Subdirectories? Unless you're talking VIDEO_TS or BDMV folders, I don't
> understand why you would have anything other than bare files.  Surely
> there is no purpose to having a folder just to hold a single
> ISO/MP4/MKV.  It's just one more thing you're going to have to click
> through to get to your content.
>
> As for subgroups, Gallery View largely eliminates the need for this.  I
> have no problem navigating through my several dozen archived TV series,
> and even my several hundred movies are still easily manageable.  Just
> make sure to use pgup/pgdn to skip full pages at a time, rather than
> having to scroll through each individual entry.
>
> You may also want to check out the various Browse Modes, where the
> structure is dynamically generated based off the stored metadata.
> Beware that on larger libraries, several of these modes can take
> considerable time to compile, and are not stored for subsequent viewings.
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Sorry I disagree with your numbers.

I take broadcast HD source material and transcode it using my own
scripts to about 25-35% of it's original size, if you include the
advert cuts the savings are huge.  As an example Dog Soldiers was
shown on Channel 4 HD on Saturday night, by the time the transcode had
finished the output 720p h264 AC3 file ran to 2.1GB from an original
source size of 9.3GB.

Transcode time for Dog Soldiers on a different backend mapped to the
same drive mappings was 2 hours 33 minutes for a two pass transcode, I
often run multiple transcodes simultaneously on the backend and the
time performance hit is only about 15% per extra transcode (limit is 3
for HD transcodes though, 6 for SD).

Once I've done my transcodes they are moved into more name friendly
libraries and accessed as videos as far as myth is concerned, I never
leave raw recordings on the backend for more then a week without
either watching and deleting or transcoding and deleting.

While I appreciate drives are relatively cheap putting in RAID5 to
ensure redundancy is a little bit more complicated and growing the
library therefore gets more complicated still.

Anyway has anyone else started to build a decent library?