[mythtv-users] is mythtv smart enough to do this (overlap/back-to-back) with recordings?

[Peter Schachte]

On Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 02:16:17AM +0200, Janne Grunau wrote:
> On Thursday 27 July 2006 01:09, Steve Hodge wrote:
> > How about implementing this way: if two shows are consecutive treat
> > them as a single program and record them into a single file. Have a
> > marker for the start of the second program (start time less the start
> > early setting) so that when it is accessed from the recorded programs
> > screen playback starts from where you'd expect it to. But don't
> > delete the file until both programs have been deleted. This does mean
> > that deleting a program may not free up any space but other than that
> > it should be a pretty unobtrusive way of implementing this
> > functionality.
> 
> No, this is unfortunately not true.
> Changing MythTV to handle more than one recording at one time per card 
> is much harder. And your proposal adds only more complexity to this 
> task.

You wouldn't need to do that.  You'd just have to get the scheduler to
fuse adjacent programs with overlapping start early/end late into a
single recording.  If you create a separate hard link to the same file
for each recording, you get the file system to keep track of how many
not-yet-deleted programs share the same file, with the file finally
removed when the last recoding is deleted.  The problem, as Steve
Hodge pointed out, is that this delays the space reclamation.  Could
give the auto-expirer headaches, as it keeps deleting recordings and
not actually freeing up any space.

> The only advantage of your idea is that the overlapping part is only 
> once on the HDD. But this disk space saving are imho neglectable.

Agreed.  This seems like the cleanest solution.  Getting the scheduler
to know about it and try to force consecutive programs on the same
channel onto the same tuner to take advantage of it might be a bit of
work, though.


-- 
Peter Schachte              It has become appallingly obvious that our
schachte at cs.mu.OZ.AU        technology has exceeded our humanity.
www.cs.mu.oz.au/~schachte/      -- Albert Einstein 
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