[mythtv-users] MythArchive: native archives
Tom Metro
tmetro+mythtv-users at gmail.com
Mon Dec 25 03:01:16 UTC 2006
The documentation for MythArchive under "To create a native archive
backup" says:
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/MythArchive#To_create_a_native_archive_backup
Choose what size DVD you are going to use and whether you want to just
create the file system or create an ISO image for later burning or
actually burn the ISO image to a blank DVD. Press 'Next'.
There are a few confusing things here.
-This seems to imply that writing to a DVD or creating an ISO is
required, even for native archives.
-The sentence above suggests the choices are "file system", "ISO
image", or "burn...to a blank DVD." What "file system" is being created?
That seems to be a typo, with "write to a destination path" being the
intent.
I gave it a spin. I chose the "Create Native Archive" menu option, and
although I was presented with options to burn to a DVD (which I
deselected) and create an ISO image (which I left selected),
according to the log (and an inspection of the file system) it never
created an ISO image. What it did do was copy the each selected video
file to the <temporary-dir>/work/<showname> directory, generate a PNG
thumbnail, and an XML file for the metadata. Nothing was created in the
specified archive directory. No errors were reported in the log.
What I gather from this is that writing to a DVD or creating an ISO is
optional, and by default it just exports the video files, meta data, and
generates thumbnails.
Is it a bug that these files never got written to the archive location,
or does the design assume that only ISO images should get written there?
The feature list for "the raw archive format" says it "can archive to
any directory on your file system..." but it doesn't mention how or
where you specify the path. This wording implies it is something you
specify for each export session.
I tried it a second time and happened to hit the right keys at the right
time and discovered that the "Select Destination" widget actually cycles
through various options. I hadn't recognized symbol - what appears to be
a checkbox with "><" inside - as I haven't seen it used elsewhere in the
Myth UI. To me it looked like a checkbox that was marked as something
that couldn't be changed, and I assumed the option was fixed due to the
path I had taken through the wizard. (On a related note, the MythArchive
UI doesn't seem to respond to mouse interaction, and (most) text boxes
ignore keyboard input, unlike the rest of the Myth UI.)
Once I found that, I was able to select a destination path, and indeed
the files were copied to that location. It'd be nice if the default
destination path was the one specified in the MythArchive settings.
Is it a bug that no ISO was created and no error appeared in the log?
(MythArchive was installed from a package (Ubuntu Feisty), and should
have all the necessary dependencies. I know mkisofs is there.)
I repeated this again, selecting "Single Layer DVD" as the destination,
and having "Make ISO Image" checked, and still no ISO was created. But
when I switched to using a destination path while selecting the option
to create an ISO, it did create an ISO. But it created the ISO using all
the files at the destination path, not just the files that were
specified to be archived. It also left the ISO in <temporary-dir>/work/,
not in the specified destination directory, as expected.
The term "native archive" is a little misleading, as archive often
implies a single container. This is more of a native export.
It should be pointed out in the documentation that the archival process
only copies the data out of Myth and leaves the original video and meta
data.
What I was looking to accomplish was to export shows that I intend to
write to DVD, but want to accumulate them on disk somewhere - preferably
not in my Myth video directory, and in a more compressed format (Xvid) -
until all missing episodes have been recorded, so they can be written to
DVD in the proper sequence. I see I can accomplish this using the
"Create DVD" wizard to export transcoded shows individually to a directory.
But what I'd really like to be able to do is to simply move specified
shows to an alternate path right from within the MythFrontend. Probably
easy enough to do that with a custom post-processing job, but it'd be
nice if the show was still accessible from Myth (I suppose a symlink
would accomplish that).
I'll update the wiki with any clarifications.
-Tom
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