[mythtv-users] Building a library.....chews up space!!

[Raymond Wagner]

On 3/28/2011 01:23, Another Sillyname wrote:
> I've been building my Library now for about 5 years and it recently
> hit 7TB of storage for assorted Movies and TV Shows. Over the last 2-3
> years more and more are HD recordings transcoded down to x264 720p,
> but these are usually about 25%-35% of the original broadcast space
> requirements.

Transcoding to h264 really just isn't worth it.  The original recordings 
are going to be 6-7GB/hr.  Losslessly cutting commercials out will drop 
that to 4-5GB/hr, but will take all of 5 minutes of your own time, and 
about as much on the backend.  On the other hand, re-compressing that to 
an equivalent quality h264 video is only going to get you to around 
2GB/hr, and will take around 6hr/hr on a modern quad core.

With 2TB drives being readily available for $70 online, you're trading 
$0.10 in hard drive capacity for $0.10 in power consumption, and you're 
wasting a whole lot of your own and your CPU time to do so.  You may as 
well just skip the whole process, and buy whatever storage you need to 
store the content as-is.

If GPU transcoding, or the hardware encoders on the new Sandy Bridge 
processors, becomes available at some point, the balance may shift.  For 
now, just buy the hard drives, and leave transcoding for support of 
mobile or embedded devices with limited codec support.

> Are there any tricks and tips you use for indexing/reference?  for
> example I split my library into Movies and TV, then into alphabetic
> subgroups i.e. 0-C, D-E, F-K where each group has about 100
> subdirectories.

Subdirectories? Unless you're talking VIDEO_TS or BDMV folders, I don't 
understand why you would have anything other than bare files.  Surely 
there is no purpose to having a folder just to hold a single 
ISO/MP4/MKV.  It's just one more thing you're going to have to click 
through to get to your content.

As for subgroups, Gallery View largely eliminates the need for this.  I 
have no problem navigating through my several dozen archived TV series, 
and even my several hundred movies are still easily manageable.  Just 
make sure to use pgup/pgdn to skip full pages at a time, rather than 
having to scroll through each individual entry.

You may also want to check out the various Browse Modes, where the 
structure is dynamically generated based off the stored metadata.  
Beware that on larger libraries, several of these modes can take 
considerable time to compile, and are not stored for subsequent viewings.