[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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