[mythtv-users] Re: Managing multiple video archives & Watch Recordings vs. MythVideo

[J. Donavan Stanley]

Jeff wrote:

> At 12:02 PM 1/24/2004 -0500, J. Donavan Stanley wrote:
>
>> comments in line
>>
>> Jeff wrote:
>>
>>> I think there is some benefit to keeping some separation between
>>> newly recorded shows and the "library". The current recording list
>>> serves as a work list of things to be edited before they are moved to
>>> the library.
>>
>>
>> All you're really talking about is categorizing content here.  
>> There's no real need to shuffle *files* around unless you're changing 
>> the file itself.  Otherwise all you need to do change the library 
>> metadata to reflect where you want the file to show up.
>
>
> I was thinking that archived (library) shows are the output of 
> mkmovie, etc. I was
> also thinking that you might want a "smallish" non-journaled 
> filesystem for recording
> output but that for the archive you might want a jfs to avoid the fsck 
> issues on a
> multi-GB/TB "disk" at boot.


One thing to keep in mind.  I'm not trying to make a huge change to the 
structure of MythTV here.  The idea is one of presentation only not 
rearchitecting how / where Myth stores things.

> From the library point of view it shouldn't matter where the files 
> live...it can
> include as many directory trees as you want.  I suspect the library 
> module probably
> doesn't even know about directories, it may only see the database and 
> the database
> contains information on the physical location of the files.

There is no library module.  Right now it's a design in my head that may 
or may not ever get implemented.  I can tell you that it will care about 
directories just as much as the other modules currently do since ALL it 
will do is provide a consistent interface to the existing content and 
allows some of it to be streamed from the backend.


>
> For instance, you mention that there needs to be a PL added to the 
> library
> and to channels/shows.

For shows I was mainly thinking of triggering off of the rating. i.e. 
TV-MA programs get set to PL 5.  And if a show had no rating then it'd 
get set to the PL of the channel.

> At first take I thought that having the PL in two places
> isn't a good idea as you'd rather just have one copy to maintain. 
> However there
> may be shows where you want the "live" version (which includes the 
> unedited recorded
> copy) to have a higher PL than the library version. These are shows 
> where you want
> to edit them before they get the "lower" rating. Having a different PL 
> on the
> library than on the recording is useful here. This implies that there 
> will be
> some separation (logically or physically) between recordings that are 
> part of the
> library and those that aren't and some user action that gets taken to 
> move or
> include shows in the library. 

There are several easy approaches to this.  One, allow each show to have 
it's own rating just like videos in MythVideo currently do.  Another is 
to simply place the recording in the "safe for kids" section of the 
library once you record it.


> The alternative is that the PL rating is a property of
> the individual recordings and I don't think this is good. You'd want 
> (I think) to be
> able to adjust the PL of all the recordings of a given "show" with a 
> simple change.

I'm not sure I see the usefulness of this...  Can you give me a scenario 
where something like this would be used?  It almost sounds like you're 
planning on editing "bad" parts out of shows to sanitize them for 
kids...  Which is an interesting idea though not strictly related to the 
issue of parental controls other than stopping junior from seeing the 
unedited version.