[mythtv] Storage Groups functionality

[Chris Pinkham]

> I'd also like to see it deal well with off-line storage, both for the
> "removable FireWire drive" case, and for future expansion into, say,
> DVD-jukebox storage of archival programs which are still in internal
> format (keeping them in internal format has many advantages to burning
> the out to DVD-Video).

I would like to see the ability for some form of off-line storage as well.
I don't know how much the Storage Group concept would have with
archiving recordings though.  If we store the directory name in the
recorded table, then you can archive some recordings off to dvd and change
their recorded.dirname to /mnt/dvd and you just have to pop in the dvd,
mount it, and proceed to play.  This could even work with frontends since
the frontend will play a file if it detects the file local rather than
trying to stream the recording from the backend.  As part of an archiving
solution though, I would like to see something that highlights what
recordings have been archived on the watch recordings screen.  Maybe this
is just an 'Archived' recording group or something, but it would be nice
to distinguish the difference from normal recordings.  We don't want to
check for existance of a file to determine whether it has been archived
or not because this can get rather slow for large Myth setups.  We used
to query the filesize of each recording when querying the recordings list
from the backend and this was getting quite slow for some people, that is
the reason we started storing the filesize in the recorded table.  There
could even be a descriptor somewhere to allow you to indicate where the
recording was archived to (ie, DVD #132) so it is easy to find and insert.
This could be displayed by the theme.  But I'm starting to drift off-topic
for this thread.  Do you have any specific ideas on how archiving would
integrate with Storage Groups specifically?

-- 
Chris