[mythtv] proposed patch: support multiple recording directories

Dave Just justifiably at cwazy.co.uk
Wed Apr 26 11:30:29 UTC 2006


Hi,

This patch sounds great (thanks!) but I wonder if we could discuss on  
the list a bit more how to manage large numbers of recordings stored  
in different places.

Automatically storing to the location with the most space sounds  
sensible at first but I imagine pretty soon people would want to have  
criteria for choosing where to record particular kinds of content,  
dealing with e.g. slave backends that come and go, maybe connected  
wirelessly, etc, etc.  With more and more recordings stored, finding  
one along a search path could be expensive (and missing recordings  
especially can cause bad delays in the watch recordings screen in the  
preview generation mechanism).

In particular I'd question this basic choice:

> The patch is larger than it could otherwise be.  The rationale is  
> that I
> didn't want to change the database format or store the pathname in the
> database in any way.  This also means that you are free to move  
> your media
> around _between_ your recording directories & it will still find  
> the media.

I'd thought about constructing a patch which does change the database  
format.  We already have a utility to rename recordings and modifying  
that to change the pathname as well doesn't seem too hard, so moving  
around recordings is a bit harder but not a major problem.

The main reason I wanted to include pathname (or similar  
location/"MRL" type of thing) was to allow removable media to store  
nuv files in a simple and direct way.
The idea would be that you could move .nuv files (and maybe  
generate .sql files as nuvexport does) to a data CD/DVD, and then  
automatically have them appear as a special program group in Watch  
Recordings when the CD/DVD is inserted.  To make this work, the  
database keeps a hash of the directory listing as part of the  
location for directories which can have removable media.  It  
adds .sql entries for the program information if it does not already  
appear in the database, but otherwise updates bookmarks etc in the  
DB.  This seems reasonably straightforward but we need to be careful  
that some locations may be read-only (so not try to generate previews  
or transcode there).  There's maybe an overlap here with Mythvideo,  
but for myself, I personally never download/rip movies, I just want a  
simple way of archiving and viewing Myth-recorded content within Myth  
itself without having to use a different interface or burn to  
standard DVD format.

In general (e.g. with slave backends or other fileservers that come  
and go as well), we would like a way of knowing whether a particular  
pathname/location is available or not (as well as it is writable),  
and then automatically filter (or grey out) recordings which cannot  
be located, rather than search every directory in the path (possibly  
trying several times to generate previews? --- sorry haven't looked  
yet to see how you deal with this).

  - Dave

  



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