[mythtv-users] Indoor HD antenna question

[Stephen Worthington]

On Mon, 23 Apr 2018 21:05:37 +0000, you wrote:

>On Mon, Apr 23, 2018 at 10:12 AM Ashu Desai <ashu.desai at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Apr 22, 2018 at 12:36 AM Stephen Worthington <
>> stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz> wrote:
>>
>>> On Sun, 22 Apr 2018 01:09:18 +0000, you wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> >wohoo!!! this did it! THANK YOU!!!
>>> >
>>> >Now - minor stuff:
>>> >
>>> >1. When i go to themes on remote frontend - i only see 3. Classic,
>>> >Classic-Wide and Terra.
>>>
>>> You need to get mythfrontend to download other themes.  It should
>>> download the list of themes when you go into the theme chooser.  If it
>>> has not, then from in the theme chooser, M(menu) and select Refresh
>>> Downloadable Themes.  You probably tried before when your networking
>>> was not working.
>>>
>>
>> Pressing menu and doing again worked! Thank you!
>>
>
>Adding 1 b: - I have an issue setting up storage group. So initially I had
>set up the following for my Movies:
>
>/usr/local/media/Videos
>
>Now I thought of adding my "TV" folder as well such:
>
>/usr/local/media/TV
>
>
>However, no matter what I do - my backend only sees the initial Videos
>folder (Movies) - I almost want to remove it and see if it now sees the TV
>but I realize that doing so means rescanning ALL my movies when I add the
>folder again. I am trying to avoid this if I can help it.

Storage group directories can be anywhere, but they do have to have
the right ownership and permissions.  I am not sure how your MythTV is
set up, but in Ubuntu, storage groups should be chown mythtv:mythtv.
Videos groups will seem to work properly with just read permissions,
but you will not be able to delete movie files.  Recording storage
groups need to be writeable - mythbackend tests writeability at
startup by creating a .test file and deleting it again.  Any recording
directory where that test fails will not be used to record to.  And
remember that in order to access a directory, permission is needed to
scan all the directories on the path to that directory.  You can also
just give full permissions to everyone (chmod a=rwx) to your storage
group directories, to avoid any permission problems.  That is what I
do as I share some of them between two different MythTV boxes.

I do not believe you would need to rescan your video files if you move
where they are to another location.  Video file data is stored in the
database under a hash computed from the start of the file.  This can
cause occasional problems where the hash for two different files works
out to be the same, but it means that if you move a file from one
video directory to a different one, the file is still recognised. Just
make sure that wherever you move the file to is visible as a video
storage group the next time you scan, and the file entry will remain
unchanged in the database.

The best way to do storage group directories is to have them as a
directory straight under /.  That way there are no problems with
permissions on the intervening directories.  They are frequently on
separate drives anyway, so have more directory structure for them is
usually undesirable in that case.  Having recording directories on
your system drive is undesirable.  The system drive is where the
database normally is, and there is lots of database activity (and
other system activity) when you are recording.  That means the drive's
heads are always moving back and forth between the recording files and
the database files and other system files and the directory storage
areas, and that severely limits how many recordings you can safely do
before the heads fail to reach one of the recording files in time and
part of the recording gets dropped because it could not be written to
disk.  Of course, if you drives are SSDs, then they can sustain a much
higher rate of activity due to not have physical heads that need to be
moved.