[mythtv-users] Developers: Future of MythTV?

[J. Donavan Stanley]

 James L. Paul wrote:

>IMO, I see little reason to do two types of disks. When I archive I always try 
>to use an industry standard format to future-proof my discs as much as 
>possible. I don't want to go through any hoops in 10 years to read my discs. 
>:)
>  
>
It's a simple matter of storage space.  If you build a DVD player 
compilant disk you'll be able to archive out about 2 hours of video per 
DVD.  If you instead write MPEG4 files to the disk you can fit more 
hours on per disk.


>I suppose it's not realistic yet to archive MPEG4 in a standard readable 
>format on plastic, but it certainly is for MPEG2. So for MPEG2 disks I'd 
>recommend a standard DVD format. There's no reason you can't include MythTV 
>metadata or whatever on a standard DVD. So you could play such disks on any 
>standard DVD player, and if you popped them into a MythTV box it would read 
>the metadata and have whatever extra functionality you want to include.
>  
>

I'm not inventing a new format here.  The only thing special about a 
MythDVD would be that the existance of the meta data in a specific file 
(think autorun.inf) that MythTV can then use to present the user with a 
DVD-like menu.  While it's true that this information COULD be stored on 
a regular DVD, the whole point of the MythDVD is that you can pack more 
video on a single disk if you give up comaptibility with DVD players 
(i.e. MPEG4 instead of MPEG2).