[mythtv-users] Why does Myth need write access to my Videos SG?

[Christopher Kerr]

On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 2:53 PM, Michael Watson <
michael at thewatsonfamily.id.au> wrote:

> On 20/09/2012 2:07 PM, Joseph Fry wrote:
>
>>
>>     > My videos directory is an SMB share and it is intentionally
>>     read-only to my
>>     > various media servers. I noticed that during Mythtv-setup, Myth
>>     complained
>>     > that it couldn't write to this directory. Can somebody tell me
>>     what Myth
>>     > needs to write to in here?
>>     >
>>     > Additionally I'm confused about the line in the wiki that says
>>     "External
>>     > Video Players (mplayer, xine, VLC) will not work with videos
>>     hosted on an
>>     > SG." - Does Myth actually modify the files in some way? This
>>     would be
>>     > catastrophic to me, as my videos are accessed by many different
>>     > applications.
>>
>>     mplayer etc does not know how to play a myth:// url and therefore
>>     cannot access the url that mthvideo hands off to the player. The file
>>     is unchanged and you can still acess it outside myth via whatever
>>     protocol works with your player - eg a mount over cifs.
>>
>> I believe that there have been several attempts at creating a fuse
>> virtual file system around the myth:// protocol, which would allow you to
>> mount your storage groups as you would any other drive... however I don't
>> think any of them are ready for prime time.
>>
>> With many players supporting upnp and mythtv's builtin upnp server, I
>> find that its rare that I need filesystem level access to my storage.
>>
>>  I have seen a wrapper script to convert the myth:// to a valid
> path/filename.
> IMO I think its a bit premature to remove support for external players,
> when there is media that the internal player does not handle well.  (But I
> am just a lowly user, and our opinion matters not)
>

As the dev's have pointed out time and time again, the solution is not to
cry "not now, not yet" but to furnish them with samples of media that
doesn't play so they can fix the player...


> I also find that streaming via the myth:// protocol, some what laggy, and
> slow to start, where access to the same file via NFS starts almost
> instantly.


This, however, I agree with - the myth:// protocol does seem to have its
own weird issues. None of them are showstoppers for my purposes, but for
some reason it seems to be much less efficient at filling the pipe than
CIFS or NFS.

- Chris
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