[mythtv-users] limited space on 1st HD, transfer some recordings to 2nd HD; transcodings sometimes nuv where mpg is expected

[James Miller]

Hi all. I have 2 HD's in my Myth box: the one the OS is on is an 80 GB 
drive that has a fair amount of free space on it, while the other is a 160 
GB drive I have mounted at /var/lib/mythtv. I'm running a bit low on space 
on the 160 GB drive, and as a possible solution I'm looking at transcoding 
commercials out of some of the recordings I want to keep, moving those 
recordings to a directory under my user's home directory on the 80 GB 
drive, then placing symlinks to those files under /var/lib/mythtv/videos. 
Does that sound like a really daft way of dealing with the space problem 
I'm confronting?

As I go about transferring some recordings to test this solution, I note 
that some of my transcoded recordings have the nuv extension, which 
surprises me. My main recording card (Internext Compression Inc iTVC16 
[CX23416] MPEG-2 Encoder) records programs as mpg's, while my second card 
(Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Video Capture)--which I've set generally not 
to record--relies on the CPU to write recordings to disk and so produces 
files with the nuv extension. I see that most recordings I've transcoded 
(to remove commercials) have the mpg extension, though others are given 
the nuv extension: any idea why this is so? Could it be that those 
recordings were perhaps made through the Bt878 card and, though transcoded 
to mpg, nonetheless were named with the nuv extension since that was the 
extension on the name of the original recording?

Input on these matters will be appreciated.

Thanks,
James