[mythtv-users] Confused about Video Settings Directories

[Nick Morrott]

On 23/03/2008, John Welch <jrw3319 at gmail.com> wrote:

> After thinking about it a bit, I guess I understand why the information was
> gone; when I said "Yes to all" under the Video Manager on the Mac Mini it
> removed all the information from the database which I'm now assuming is
> stored with a full path name.  Where my confusion comes in is that I always
> thought the video folder settings were frontend specific.

As you have discovered, in this case 'frontend specific' means that
whenever you scan media files in Video Manager (and also Music and
Images) - even if they are available to multiple frontends - the paths
stored are specific to that frontend at time of scanning. As no
hostname is stored against the media record, no checks are carried out
before the potential mass-deletion of entries from the database, even
if this means breaking access to all other frontends.

The obvious-when-you've-been-bitten answer is to use common
mountpoints for all of your frontends which works around this annoying
bug. It's entirely likely that over time, mountpoints can change,
especially when new frontends are added to an otherwise stable
installation.

> I guess I've
> just been lucky that I always use the same naming convention when I mount my
> shares on the Linux boxes.  My question is besides making sure that I always
> mount the NAS NFS share the same way under all systems, including the Mac,
> is there anything else I could have or should have done prevent the
> information from disappearing?  Where I'm concerned is you never know when
> there could be some type of issue mounting the NFS share, and if someone
> other than myself was using a frontend they could easily wipe out all the
> information again with a simple "Yes to all".

I was bitten by this bug a few years ago after scanning a lot of music
files. I had a couple of frontends, the newest of which used a
different mountpoint during testing. When the music manager scanned
for new music after not finding any, paths changed making the existing
music inaccessible to the other machines.

If you updated to 0.21 before losing this data, you should still have
a copy of your database at time of upgrade in your recordings
directory - if you find it you can extract the relevant  information
and repopulate the DB manually.

-- 
Nick Morrott

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