[mythtv-users] mythtv on 2 computers and filenames

[Simon Hobson]

Stephen Worthington <stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz> wrote:

>> laptop and desktop are quite near in the same room and of course, there 
>> is network between them.
>> 
>> Is it possible to tell mythtv on both machines to record episodes on the 
>> same external usb-disk  and to acceed films from the desktop machine 
>> even if the laptop is down ?

> You can set up one of the PCs with an external drive, and then get
> that PC to record directly to the external drive.  And you can set up
> a network connection from the other PC and get it to record over that
> connection to the external drive.

That does require the machine hosting the drive to be on all the time - which Klaus has said he doesn't want. If he was prepared to have the laptop on all the time, then just using teh one backend would be a LOT simpler.

> However, if the drive was on a USB 2 connection,
> that would make it too slow to record very well.  A USB 3 drive would
> be fine.  You would have to make sure that not too many recordings
> were made at the same time to the drive - two recordings from each PC
> would likely be too much.

If Klaus was prepared to run a single backend, then the laptop could record to it's limited internal storage - and then have a script move the recording file to the external drive when things are quiet (no recordings in progress and no frontends running).


Klaus Becker <colonius at free.fr> wrote:

> And I cannot rely the external drive to both machines ?


Short version: No, you cannot connect the drive to two computers at once - that is a recipe for near instant disaster as they will just trash the filesystem between them - each one will write what it thinks is on the drive, corrupting all the filesystem data structures as they go.

Longer version: Well, you can, but you have to use a filesystem and host setups that is specifically designed for that - the hosts need to co-ordinate between themselves what is going on with the filesystem. It's not something I've done, and it's the sort of thing normally reserved for hosting where the operators want the flexibility of accessing storage from multiple machines (typically a cluster) at once. But in the general case, you can't just connect the drive to two computers at once.