[mythtv-users] Always record like TiVO (was Re: OT: Interesting study on HDD failure by Googlelabs)
Michael T. Dean
mtdean at thirdcontact.com
Mon Feb 19 18:08:31 UTC 2007
On 02/19/2007 12:20 PM, Marco Nelissen wrote:
> One of the points they make:
> Contrary to previously reported results, we found
> very little correlation between failure rates and ei
> ther elevated temperature or activity levels.
>
> I remember a while ago disk failure due to wear was brought forward as a
> reason against tivo-like "always record with all tuners" functionality
> in mythtv.
Right. As you said, /a/ reason. Not /the/ reason. ;)
> Time to reconsider that... :)
As is people are/have been whining about the fact that LiveTV is only
expired once per day so they can't "see how much disk space is
available". If tuners were always recording, there would always be 0
space available (although, perhaps on only one of potentially many
partitions with the new Storage Groups).
There's also the, "If I don't /ever/ watch LiveTV, why should my system
record it, write recording info to the DB (which is actually quite
resource-intensive with MPEG-2 seek tables), and potentially saturate
network bandwidth (depending on location of filesystems/MySQL
server/whatever)?" reasoning.
And the, "What are the chances that the show currently showing on the
last channel recorded by one of my capture cards is actually the one I
want to watch (but didn't take the time to set up a rule to record)?"
And, I'm sure there are many others. But, if someone really wants the
functionality, they can make a patch (making said behavior optional) and
post it at http://svn.mythtv.org/ for consideration.
However, IMHO, the patch is completely unnecessary as the existing
MythTV can do what you probably really want. If you want MythTV to
always record CNN unless there's a scheduled recording, you should
create a custom recording rule (matching the callsign or whatever), set
it to a low priority (even -99), and, if desired, put it in the LiveTV
group (so it's autoexpired at highest priority--although setting Myth to
expire lowest-priority recordings first would work without the LiveTV
group if all your recordings are a higher priority). If you have 4
capture cards, choose the 1, 2, 3, /or/, 4 channels you want to always
record.
This is pretty much like the TiVO functionality, except it allows you to
specify which channel(s) to record (i.e. your favorites)--rather than
"last used"--and it doesn't necessarily record until it switches (i.e.
if CNN has a 4-hour show that will conflict with a recording that starts
after 3 1/2 hours of the 4-hour show, Myth will skip the whole 4-hour
show--unless you add a manual recording override with a -30 end late or
whatever).
See http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/156423#156423 and
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/153707#153707 and
note that the documentation to which Bruce refers is now at
http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-12.html#ss12.5 .
As a matter of fact, rather than changing Myth to work like the TiVo
does, it would be pretty easy to change the Myth UI to automatically
create said recording rules with a simple interface requiring the user
to specify only the channel to "always record."
Mike
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