[mythtv-users] Successful Myth Install - 2 Questions

Bill Witherspoon billw at witherspoon-design.com
Wed Oct 4 23:07:49 UTC 2006


* Dewey Smolka <dsmolka at gmail.com> [2006-10-03 18:13:28 -0500]:

> On 10/3/06, Bill Witherspoon <billw at witherspoon-design.com> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > First thanks to the community for making this great package. I've been
> > following for a couple of years with a myth install in the lab (the
> > office), but finally had the guts to go all out and put one in the
> > living room. WAF is high despite a couple of issues:
> >
> > 1) My case is a Silverstone LC10B, and the fans are *LOUD*. If I run
> > both front intake and the 2 60mm rears, I can hear the box upstairs in
> > the bedroom - probably 30+ ft and two walls away. Has anyone else faced
> > this? My only solution was to unplug the intake fan which seems to cut
> > the noice appreciably, but I still think the two fans in the back are
> > quite loud. Any suggestions?
> 
> Yup. Therein lies the problem with HTPC-type cases. You need to put a
> lot of heat producing components that need to work hard in a tight
> space. You could look for quieter fans, but unfortunately 60mm fans
> are going to produce a lot of noise no matter what -- the smaller the
> fan the faster it has to spin to move enough air for cooling.
> Unplugging the fans will reduce the noise but greatly increase the
> risk of card/CPU/HDD failure.
> 
> The obvious tip is to split the backend and frontend functions into
> two machines -- leave the video card and a small HDD (or net boot) in
> the Silverstone for the frontend, and build a backend out of any old
> beige box. A tower or mid-tower has lots more room for airflow and
> will hold an 80 or 92mm fan. Without all the heat from the capture
> card, HDD, and CPU activity the temperature should drop enough that
> the fans spin more slowly and quietly.

Thanks for the advice - I just wasn't quite ready to to try a front/back
end setup. Now I regret it a bit. I initially discarded for cost
reasons, and the fact that I don't have any easy way to run ethernet
into the TV room so wireless was the only option.
> 
> 
> > 2) Myth (0.20 on Gentoo btw) seems to occasionally split recordings
> > seemingly at random. At first I thought it was related to file size (I'm
> > on XFS) because it split a 6 hr recording into 3 pieces. Last night,
> > however, it split a one hour recording at ~47 minutes. My only suspect
> > is mythfilldatabase which I had set to update once per day scheduled by
> > Zap2it. The mythbackendlogs seem to show that mythfilldatabase is
> > running multiple times/day at fairly strange time (5pm??). Does
> > mythfilldatabase shutdown the back end to do it's work? Regardless, I've
> > changed the update to once every 2 days, between 1am and 3am. Is that
> > appropriate?
> 
> Not sure about the file splitting issue, but mythfilldatabase does not
> shut down mythbackend. However, you will want to run mythfilldatabase
> daily -- once the database is populated, it only retrieves the next
> day and the last day -- i.e. tomorrow and two weeks from today. The
> rest of the data is left alone.
> 
> Also, a while back TMS (Zap2It) asked us to NOT run mythfill database
> in the middle of the night -- their servers were getting hammered
> during those times. IIRC, they suggested running it between 9:00 and
> 17:00 EST.
> 
> Good luck
> _______________________________________________

Thanks! I'm enjoying myself plenty. I'll set my mythfilldatabase setting
back to the way it was and see if I can find anything else suspicious on
the splitting issue. I've also enable database logging so I'll see what
accumlates there.

Bill.


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list