[mythtv-users] Folders in Recordings

[Michael T. Dean]

Paul Wheeler wrote:

>How easy to program and usefull would it be to have folders for
>recordings i.e. A movies folder, etc. What do other people think?
>  
>
IMHO, it's not worth the time/effort involved (changing the code to 
store path info in the database or to derive path info from program 
details, adding a UI for specifying/selecting directory, etc.).  Most 
unix filesystems use a linear searching algorithm within directories, so 
filesystem performance may suffer if storing several thousand files in a 
directory.  However, assuming you only record 30-minute programs and use 
MPEG-4 encoding, each file you record will be approximatly 0.5GB.  
Therefore several thousand of these files will require a huge storage 
array (i.e. 2000 files--which probably wouldn't be too big of a 
performance hit on most filesystems) will take 1000GB = 1TB.  Since most 
people record 1-hr shows and even 2-hr movies, the storage requirements 
would be even higher still, and you're likely to need many times that 
number of files to suffer performance problems.  Just make sure that you 
put all your music/videos/images/etc. into other directories (or 
subdirectories of your recordings directory).

If searching the list of files is the problem, check out mythlink.sh in 
the contrib directory of the MythTV source.  With it, you can create 
"views" of your recordings with any structure you like using soft links 
to the "ugly" filenames used by Myth.  I currently have it modified to 
create one view sorted by date/time and another view sorted by program 
title and it runs every 30 minutes in a cron job.  It would also be 
possible to have it create a directory structure based on some criteria 
(i.e. one directory per show title--like the "Watch Recordings" dialog 
in Myth uses--with episodes listed underneath, or one directory per 
genre with titles listed underneath, or both :).

Mike