[mythtv-users] Rundown on Videos

[Robert Johnston]

On 11/25/05, Thom Paine <painethom at gmail.com> wrote:
> Can I get a rundown on the best way to work with mythvideo?

<snip />

> I was thinking that I need to NFS mount the /video partition on /video
> on each of the local frontends to get that to work. I've ripped a few
> DVD's to watch on there (funny how Baby Einstein made the list when
> you have a 1 year old) but they don't seem to play.

That's right (About the NFS), what format did you rip the DVD's in,
and what are you trying to play them back in? (Missing Codecs if in
AVI DivX/XviD format, missing DeCSS if you ripped to .iso?)

> Also, can I create directories in my /video/videos directory and will
> it recurse them properly so that I can seperate some of these, like
> the kids shows in one, mine in another, and some of my wife's stuff
> elsewhere? I guess I could just try it and see if it works, but I'd
> rather wait and get some feedback from people who are using this daily
> to see how best to set it up.

You can use folders, and if you enable the "Gallery View Browses
folders" (Or whatever it's titled, something similar to that), it'll
browse the files and folders in a proper manner as you'd expect.

> Also, of the DVD's I ripped, I didn't get the movie posters. Does it
> automatically download them from somewhere, or do I need to hit some
> keys to get that to work?

You need to go into the "Video Manager", and from the menu for each
recording, go to "Search IMDB". This'll do it's best to get the info
and poster from IMDB. If that doesn't work, you can find the movie on
IMDB yourself, and enter the number (without the "tt", so "01234567"
for movie ID "tt01234567", find that ID in the URL) into the "Manually
get from IMDB" option.

> And finally, since I plan on ripping alot of my DVD collection, I'm
> unsure if I should get four 300G SATA drives and set them up in a
> RAID5 array, so I have redundancy, or stripe them altogether and have
> a little more room. I guess the only real savings will by my TV
> recorded shows that I would like to have in the event of hardware
> failure, because all my DVD's I have and can rerip them over time.

If you want the best combination of redundancy and speed, use RAID
0+1. This will, however, only give you 600G of space, rather than the
900G RAID 5 gives you.

Personally, I'd not use RAID 0 on it's own unless you are either
absolutely certain of the uality of the drives, or you really don't
care about what's stored on them.

> Thanks for reading this far and looking forward to some feedback.

eeeEEEEEEEEEE!!!

Sorry, wrong kind of feedback. :)
--
Robert "Anaerin" Johnston