[mythtv-users] Successful Myth Install - 2 Questions

[Dewey Smolka]

On 10/3/06, Bill Witherspoon <billw at witherspoon-design.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
> First thanks to the community for making this great package. I've been
> following for a couple of years with a myth install in the lab (the
> office), but finally had the guts to go all out and put one in the
> living room. WAF is high despite a couple of issues:
>
> 1) My case is a Silverstone LC10B, and the fans are *LOUD*. If I run
> both front intake and the 2 60mm rears, I can hear the box upstairs in
> the bedroom - probably 30+ ft and two walls away. Has anyone else faced
> this? My only solution was to unplug the intake fan which seems to cut
> the noice appreciably, but I still think the two fans in the back are
> quite loud. Any suggestions?

Yup. Therein lies the problem with HTPC-type cases. You need to put a
lot of heat producing components that need to work hard in a tight
space. You could look for quieter fans, but unfortunately 60mm fans
are going to produce a lot of noise no matter what -- the smaller the
fan the faster it has to spin to move enough air for cooling.
Unplugging the fans will reduce the noise but greatly increase the
risk of card/CPU/HDD failure.

The obvious tip is to split the backend and frontend functions into
two machines -- leave the video card and a small HDD (or net boot) in
the Silverstone for the frontend, and build a backend out of any old
beige box. A tower or mid-tower has lots more room for airflow and
will hold an 80 or 92mm fan. Without all the heat from the capture
card, HDD, and CPU activity the temperature should drop enough that
the fans spin more slowly and quietly.


> 2) Myth (0.20 on Gentoo btw) seems to occasionally split recordings
> seemingly at random. At first I thought it was related to file size (I'm
> on XFS) because it split a 6 hr recording into 3 pieces. Last night,
> however, it split a one hour recording at ~47 minutes. My only suspect
> is mythfilldatabase which I had set to update once per day scheduled by
> Zap2it. The mythbackendlogs seem to show that mythfilldatabase is
> running multiple times/day at fairly strange time (5pm??). Does
> mythfilldatabase shutdown the back end to do it's work? Regardless, I've
> changed the update to once every 2 days, between 1am and 3am. Is that
> appropriate?

Not sure about the file splitting issue, but mythfilldatabase does not
shut down mythbackend. However, you will want to run mythfilldatabase
daily -- once the database is populated, it only retrieves the next
day and the last day -- i.e. tomorrow and two weeks from today. The
rest of the data is left alone.

Also, a while back TMS (Zap2It) asked us to NOT run mythfill database
in the middle of the night -- their servers were getting hammered
during those times. IIRC, they suggested running it between 9:00 and
17:00 EST.

Good luck