[mythtv] Multiple recording directories

Terry Barnaby terry1 at beam.ltd.uk
Thu Jan 13 12:41:43 EST 2005


Paul Greidanus wrote:
> 
> 
> Mark Edwards wrote:
> 
>>> I was thinking along these lines before Christmas when I wanted to 
>>> temporarily add an extra disk for Christmas films to my server.
>>> I added a bit of code to Myth to allow me to do this, a bit of a hack.
>>>
>>> This added the Global preference: "VideoDirs" beneath the 
>>> "RecordFilePrefix" option. This took a ":" separated list of dirs.
>>> This only worked for playback and you had to manually copy files to 
>>> these dirs. Also the expire system did not work here.
>>>
>>> Some issues:
>>> 1. Would one directory be the master where files videos are stored
>>>     and the other ones extra ones or should all dirs be
>>>     equally used wherever space is available ?
>>> 2. If the directories are considered "extra" dirs MythTv
>>>     could move all videos that are not marked to expire to these
>>>     directories in the background automatically.
>>>
>>> It didn't look like to much work to add although there were quite a 
>>> few places whene "RecordFilePrefix" was used.
>>>   
>>
>>
>> I've been considering this recently too but had thought of a different
>> approach.
>> I was thinking about extending the recording groups functionality to 
>> allow
>> you to specify that a certain recording group would record to a certain
>> directory.
>>
>> Then I could have a recording group for members of the family with 
>> their own
>> recording group and their own disk-space which they could manage 
>> themselves.
>> (to an extent!)
>>
>> It's a step further towards having multi-user functionality which I think
>> would be a v. useful feature
>>
>> Mark
>>
>>  
>>
> Sounds like a lot of people have been thinking of multiple disks for a 
> while.  I had some thoughts on it a few days ago, from a hack standpoint 
> more then doing it right..  The multi-user thing is something that I'm 
> also very interested in getting working.
> 
> But, my idea for extra video disks:
> Write up a script, probably Bash, that has a record of which disks are 
> to be used for secondary video storage (/video1, /video2, /video3).  It 
> checks for real files in /video, and after making sure they're not still 
> being recorded, moves them to one of the video disks, based on available 
> space on the secondary disks, and then makes a symlink in the /video 
> disk for the recording.  Then just run this script every few hours, 
> every day, or whenever.
One problem with this is when MythTv deletes or autoexpires a recording.
With sybolic links (as in fact I have at the moment) only the symbolic
links get removed. There needs to be some code change in MythTv
to handle this ...

Terry
> 
> Alternately, LVM might be a much better solution, but then you get 
> problems like loss of all the data on a single disk failure...
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