[mythtv-users] Mythtv .19 live watching

[Isaac Richards]

On Thursday 13 July 2006 2:25 pm, chris at cpr.homelinux.net wrote:
> The kids walking away or the dog stepping on the keyboard are only
> problems because the design assumptions make them into problems.  I
> get your point -- "stuff happens" -- but a robust application
> shouldn't even see most of that "stuff" as problems.

Please explain how to do live-tv in a full-disk situation (before starting 
live tv) without:
a) deleting a recording the user has already said can be deleted.
or
b) reserving space for live-tv only (and so preventing less to be recorded in 
the first place, irregardless of how often someone uses live-tv).
or
c) just disallowing live-tv to run, even though there are programs that could 
be deleted, and the user obviously wants to go into live-tv.

Obviously, c will have to happen anyway, if there's nothing marked as 
deletable, but it's nice to keep that from happening if at all possible.  I 
rather dislike b, because I want as much recorded at any given time as I have 
space for.

Even with a ring-buffer (ie, <= 0.18), you need to have space on the drive 
available to start it in the first place.

The problem with chunking livetv into smaller boundaries than a full program 
is that in the full disk situation (which should be the norm for most people 
after a short time of recording things), there won't be _any_ chunks other 
than the most current one being recorded.  Everything else will have been 
auto-expired to make space for the next chunk.  To me, that makes the ability 
to keep the recording completely useless.  What use would a 5 minute 
ring-buffer be?  The minimum I'd consider chunking a live-tv program to would 
be 8 hours, I think.  Harddrives are cheap enough for that, anyway.

Let's see, other options..  could prompt the user so that they're explicitly 
aware that something's going to be auto-expired when they enter live-tv, but 
the normal user that uses auto-expire (who always a full-drive) is going to 
get that message _every_ _single_ _time_ they start live-tv.  That's not 
helpful or useful, that's annoying.  A user that deletes programs manually 
wouldn't ever see the prompt, but they'd almost never be in the situation 
where live-tv would possibly need extra space in the first place.

Way I see it: if you don't want something to be autoexpired, don't turn it on 
in the first place.  If a program is allowed to be autoexpired, it's _going_ 
to be deleted at some point.  If you don't want something deleted when space 
is needed, simply disable autoexpire for it.  I don't see that as a design 
flaw.

I just got a 'global live-tv inactivity timeout' proposed to me, which could 
help.  Ie, automatically exit after 4 hours of inactivity or whatnot.

Any other ideas?  Please, just don't ignore what happens when the disk is 
_always_ full, and remember that regular scheduled recordings are also going 
to be causing auto-expireable programs to be deleted.

And no, automatically buying and installing new harddrives won't work. =)

Isaac