[mythtv-users] Saving Disk Space

[jedi]

On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 12:17:56PM -0700, Brad DerManouelian wrote:
> On Jul 26, 2008, at 3:05 AM, Allen Edwards wrote:
> 
> > Does this seem right?  I "transcoder: Low Quality" 35 minutes of  
> > Jepordy
> > and it takes 3.6G of disk space while 65 minutes of The News Hour is
> > only 4.8G and it is not transcoded?  Both shows are HD.  The problem  
> > is
> > we end up with like 30 of these things backed up.
> 
> HD could mean anything. It depends on the bandwidth the broadcaster  
> decides to use. This assumes you mean OTA. Again, "HD" could mean  
> anything.
> 
> > Is there a way to make the storage space smaller or should I just go  
> > buy
> > more drives?
> 
> Adjust your transcoders to make them compress as much as you like.
> And yes, you should buy a great big hard drive. 1TB is about $175 now.
> I'm all about buying larger drives and putting less stress on the  
> processor for transcoding.

     HD is BIG. Even if you have several big fat harddrives you still
need to transcode in order to get a decent amount of recording time
when compared to SD. You may also find that the bitrate for SD content
on OTA digital channels is a bit much. You may very well see absurdly
large files for SD digital content (I do).

     I would say transcode as much as you can and remember that any
machine on the network (including your main desktop machine) can lend
a hand.