[mythtv-users] Mythtv .19 live watching

[Isaac Richards]

On Friday 14 July 2006 3:41 am, Osma Ahvenlampi wrote:
> On to, 2006-07-13 at 16:45 -0400, Isaac Richards wrote:
> > Please explain how to do live-tv in a full-disk situation (before
> > starting live tv) without:
> > a) deleting a recording the user has already said can be deleted.
> > or
> > b) reserving space for live-tv only (and so preventing less to be
> > recorded in the first place, irregardless of how often someone uses
> > live-tv). or
> > c) just disallowing live-tv to run, even though there are programs that
> > could be deleted, and the user obviously wants to go into live-tv.
>
> I'd think that would be fairly obvious, if you consider not the current
> implementation, but what a user would expect to happen with a TV set:
>
> d) display live tv, but show a message over the OSD that storage space
> is not available, so time-shift capability and recording are disabled.

Which would happen every single time the user entered live-tv.  Nor is it 
exactly optimal for remote frontends.  Why would you want to put up with the 
extra latency and delay of compressing video for transfer when you're not 
saving it to a file?  Then I'd get bitching about how slow it was to change 
channels _and_ "why won't it let me pause?" and "I was watching a movie I 
didn't know I'd like, but the ending was so good and it wouldn't let me keep 
it!"

> If you'd want to make it fancy, provide a shortcut for the user to
> delete one of two or three shows the system expects to be least wanted
> without having to exit live tv. The decision on what is least wanted
> should be what the auto-prioritization would have deleted if there were
> expirable programs.

Let's repeat:

The normal user has a full drive _all_ the time.

and again, in a slightly different manner:

A full harddrive is the normal, and expected result of using Myth for more 
than a short period of time, due to scheduled recordings and auto-expire.

That means,_every_ single time they try to enter live-tv, they'll get a prompt 
for "what show do you want to delete?", or be told they can't pause TV or 
rewind to see something they just missed.  Changing the action of a menu item 
behind the scenes depending on how much harddrive space is available somehow 
doesn't seem right to me.

My wife recently left live-tv on over a weekend while we were out of town.  
Looking over the autoexpire logs, it looks like I "lost" 2 half hour programs 
from 2 months ago.  Drat.

Isaac