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

[jedi]

On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 02:39:51PM +0100, Another Sillyname wrote:
> On 28/03/2011, Raymond Wagner <raymond at wagnerrp.com> wrote:
> > On 3/28/2011 01:23, Another Sillyname wrote:
[deletia]
> 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.

   I don't view disk management as the big issue. I view the size of the
library to be the big challenge. After awhile, it does get to be quite a
lot of stuff to sort through. Like with recording rules, after awhile you
want some means to automatically select stuff, almost like MythTV for your
video collection.

   I have a number of what might be called "smart playlists" to deal with
this sort of thing. My external player has some logic to help enable this.

[deletia]

    If I didn't transcode, my n+1 disks would be 3*(n+1) disks or 4*(n+1)
disks and I would either need a much more complicated disk setup or just
"do without".

    I just RIP DVDs. I don't bother archiving recordings.