[mythtv-users] Best Hardware

[Yeechang Lee]

Marco Nelissen <marcone at xs4all.nl> says:
> Out of curiosity (since other people have mentioned similar
> storage for their mythtv machines), what does one do with upwards
> of 1 terabyte of storage for a mythtv box?

2TB of MythTV-dedicated storage here. (And I very, very much look forward to
0.20's ability to use multiple storage locations, because I have
another 2.8TB that's not fully utilized at the moment.)

> I mean, I realize that HD needs a lot of space,

That's for sure. For those besides Marco who are curious about how
much, search the list archives for 'yeechang high-bandwidth'.

> but with that much space you could easily store 100+ hours of HDTV.

MythWeb tells me that I have "183 programs, using 1.7TB (335 hrs 44
mins) out of 1.8TB (31GB free.)"

> Why? Are you guys collecting entire shows by the season,

I delete almost everything I record with MythTV after watching it
once. That said, with two HD cable boxes and one over-the-air HD
capture card, a lot of 

My tastes are eclectic. I like dramas (this TV season, _Bones_ and
_Numb3rs_ are among my choices), comedies (_How I Met Your Mother_),
hybrids (_Gilmore Girls_, _Smallville_, _The OC_), and talk shows
(Conan, Letterman, and Leno, in that order). All sorts of movies, too;
for years, I'd take an hour or so each week to go through my TiVo's
list of all upcoming movies in the coming week and record the
interesting ones, and I've continued the practice with MythTV [1]. I
have _Shakespeare in Love_, _Emma_, _Ghostbusters_, and _Ben-Hur_,
among others, to enjoy again--now in HD--and the likes of _Giant_,
_Napoleon Dynamite_, and _GoodFellas_ to try for the first time.

Time, or lack thereof, is the issue. I am an investment banker and
typically stagger home after a day that began long before sunup. Thus,
my watching is limited to a few hours on weekday evenings (many are
the nights I've fallen asleep, remote in hand, on the couch with the
TV on) and the weekends. That means that, when I do have the time to
briefly relax in front of the TV, having as large a library as
possible at my fingertips is all the more important.

[1] I use a special Custom Record rule set inactive [2], then view the
episodes ('O') the rule generates (after pushing '2' to collapse
duplicates), in order to replicate the systematic movie scheduling [2]
I did with TiVo [3]. (Since I'm almost always only interested in HD
movies now, but not all HD movies on the premium cable channels are
marked as such in the Zap2IT/Tribune data feed, the rule grabs all
movies in the premium channels plus movies specifically marked as HD
from elsewhere.)

[2] By the way, is there a hard-wired limit in mythfrontend to not be
able to return more than 1000 lines of a query?  As I've previously
noted here, Schedule|Lists|Movies gives me about 1000 lines (90+ pages
at 11 lines each)--or about 1 1/2 days' worth--of results, rather than
the expected two weeks' worth. Fortunately, the results of the custom
rule fall under the size limit.

[3] Suggestion to developers: How about a third choice, besides
'active' and 'inactive' (perhaps 'search template'), for rules used
just to search with, without necessarily recording all (or even any)
of the programs? With the current arrangement, I have to go through
some contortions to record movies off the list of results and I run
the risk that doing so will 'break' the rule, causing it to disappear.

-- 
Yeechang Lee <ylee at pobox.com> | +1 650 776 7763 | San Francisco CA US