[mythtv-users] Program information storage

[Michael T. Dean]

On 02/19/2007 02:11 AM, Shawn Rutledge wrote:
>   In general the myth database is taking up several gigs.  Other
> big tables are credits (111,369 rows), program, programgenres,

Someone doesn't run mythfilldatabase...  If you're using 0.20-fixes or 
below, you /must/ run mythfilldatabase to do database cleanup.  (In SVN 
trunk, the cleanup has been moved to the backend for EIT-only users.)  
If you're not using it to populate your database, just run it with 
"mythfilldatabase --no-delete" and it will make your database /much/ 
smaller.  You can do this as often as you like (daily, weekly, monthly, 
whenever-you-feel-like-it-ly).

>  and
> recordedseek.  Is this normal?  Is there some periodic cleanup I ought
> to do to save space and optimize the database?

# du -sk mythconverg/
259724  mythconverg/

~260MB = 253.6MiB to store information from 3 years of MythTV use

Number of shows: 628
Number of episodes: 5380
First recording: Monday May 3rd, 2004
Last recording: Sunday February 18th, 2007
Total Time: 181 days 17 hrs 30 mins wasted

Even if you're using a pitifully-low MPEG-2 recording bitrate of 
2200kbps (at 1GiB/hr=low-quality recordings) or the same for MPEG-4 
(which is not too bad for that CODEC), that 3-year-old database is 
taking up the same space as 15 minutes of recording.  Not worth worrying 
about (once you clean it appropriately with mythfilldatabase).

And, I have a grand total of 437 programs currently available in 
recordings.  Only 3 of those programs are not MPEG-2.  And, /that/'s 
what makes the database big (having MPEG-2 recordings).  See 
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/220254#220254 (note, 
though, that for 0.20+, recordedmarkup should be small and recordedseek 
should be large (all the non-markup data that made recordedmarkup large 
was moved).

Mike