[mythtv-users] Managing multiple video archives & Watch Recordings vs. MythVideo

[Eric Litman]

I've been running my backend server for a couple of months now, and all
the while my PVR-350 has been happily filling its locally connected
disks. I now want to migrate some of this content - particularly movies
- to my SAN, where I already store ripped DVDs for MythVideo, and am
looking for input on the best way to manage the process.

How do others deal with this issue? Are people moving/deleting/updating
by hand? 

There are a few thoughts that strike me about this endeavor:

 - It's a time consuming, albeit not difficult, process to rename .nuv
files to .mpg (or set up an association), move them to a
MythVideo-accessible mount point, and either migrate the metadata from
the Recorded Programs-related tables to MythVideo's tables or simply
delete the data from the DB and do a new IMDB lookup. This could be
done by hand, but is far better suited to being scripted.

 - Adding additional local storage via RAID, LVM et al may alleviate
short-term space constraints, but it doesn't really address this issue
for the long-term. I have 410GB in LVM-managed storage on my backend
server with no more bays for additional drives, and a few TB available
via SAN & NAS. As I would assume is the case with some percentage of
the current and potential MythTV users out there, I have an HTPC in my
living room acting as a combined frontend/backend, and my "data center"
in my office (or basement, or closet...) It's functionally and
aesthetically more appropriate for me to add storage there and network
attach it to my backend than it would be to seek alternative paths to
increased local storage on the backend itself.

 - Transcoding is certainly useful for storage management in some
cases, but in general I'm quite pleased with the MPEG2 output of the
PVR-350 and would prefer to keep video in its original state.

 - This point goes a bit further afield, but it seems to fit somewhere
in this context. While it's easy to draw the logistic/physical
distinction between content recorded by the TV encoder and "other"
video content (Watch Recordngs vs. MythVideo), is it really necessary
to separate the two sets as part of the end-user experience? To an
end-user, shouldn't the location where content is stored and the
mechanism used to display that content be irrelevant? Note that I pose
this merely for broad discussion - I have not looked deeply enough into
the capabilities of all the supporting infrastructure required to merge
the video frontends (e.g. whether mplayer can be coerced into
performing the video preview function available in mythtv).

Thoughts? Suggestions? Comments?

-Eric