[mythtv-users] Proof of Concept a success!

[Rod Smith]

On Monday 16 April 2007 09:10, David Frascone wrote:

Others have provided good responses, but I'd like to add a bit....

> Given what I've now learned, I've modified my next approach.  My
> first-cut system will have a backend.  I have two spare computers with
> around 100Gb each.  (I think one has 80Gb).  So, I'm going to combine
> both drives into one system and make it a dedicated back-end.

I'd recommend buying a new hard drive (as large as you can afford/justify) 
instead, for two reasons:

1) You'll quickly discover that 180GB is small, particularly when recording
   HD content. You'll want as much disk space as possible. Of course, you
   can always add hard drives, but that brings me to point #2....

2) You're more likely to suffer a drive failure when using multiple drives
   than when you've got just one. This is particularly true if you're using
   older ("spare," you said) drives.

That said, if you're just trying to reduce the startup costs and intend to 
replace the drives with something else in the not-too-distant future, using 
your existing 180GB in two drives may be a reasonable stopgap measure. It 
might also be reasonable to put your Linux installation itself on an existing 
hard drive that's separate from the main recording drive. That'll free up a 
little space for recordings. Increased drive failure probability will still 
be an issue, but at least the failure would be localized to the OS or to the 
recordings, not to both.

> 1) mythtv-setup seems like a FE program -- is there a lighter weight
> version for dedicated backends?

I'm not sure why you'd want something else. I don't recall any frontend 
options in mythtv-setup. If you simply want to run a backend without X, you 
could either start X temporarily just to run mythtv-setup and then shut X 
down when you're done; or you could run mythtv-setup remotely, via an SSH or 
other remote login that passes X requests. The former option would probably 
be simpler if you're not already familiar with X and remote X sessions.

> 3) Soon I'll be receiving my dual tuner card, and a STB dedicated to my
> myth setup.  Is there a way to have myth default to a tuner for most
> recordings, and only use the STB for digital channels?

You can set priorities to different tuners (your STB over firewire qualifies 
as a tuner for this discussion); however, unless you've got a powerful 
dislike of a particular tuner, I recommend against using this option. The 
problem is that MythTV will schedule later showings of programs whenever 
possible. So for instance, if you've got three shows at 8:00 you want to 
record, and they're all on analog channels, MythTV will bump one of them to a 
later time (perhaps even days later), if possible, rather than use the 
lower-priority tuner. I suspect that's not what you want, although it might 
be if your STB is flaky or produces a poor picture.

Instead of using priorities for minor preferences, I recommend just defining 
the tuners in order of preference. Unless you issue an override or want to 
record something on a channel that's delivered only via a particular tuner, 
MythTV schedules recordings using the lowest-numbered tuner first. Thus, if 
you give your conventional analog tuners the #1 and #2 slots and define the 
STB/Firewire setup as tuner #3, the STB/Firewire tuner will be used only for 
channels that it alone provides, when you've got three things scheduled to 
record at a particular time, or when you explicitly request that the 
STB/Firewire tuner be used.

-- 
Rod Smith
http://www.rodsbooks.com