[mythtv-users] live-tv

[Michael T. Dean]

On 04/11/2009 09:20 PM, Raymond Wagner wrote:
> Elizabeth Steinke wrote:
>   
>> What happens if someone forgets to shutdown a frontend and its on live
>> tv. Does it just stay connected to the backend buffering data to the
>> disks? Wouldn't this be hard on the disks on the backend if this were
>> a common occurence. Is their a way to have it go back to the menu
>> and/or shut itself down after a specified time?
>>     
> A single instance of livetv will result in a single linear block of
> data, and one at most 2MB/s.  Not hard at all for a hard drive to
> handle.  Now MythTV will keep these files for a day or so before
> auto-expiring, so if you are low on space, that may be a problem.  There
> is a sleep timer available in the onscreen menu.

Though if you are low on space, MythTV will automatically expire
recordings /before/ you run out of space and it will expire LiveTV
recordings--even LiveTV younger than the 1-day "max LiveTV
lifetime"--before expiring scheduled recordings.

However, as Raymond implied, if you are /extremely/ low on space and the
channel on which LiveTV is playing happens to have a long show come on
(i.e. a 4hr miniseries rerun as a single program), Myth won't be able to
autoexpire that show until it has finished recording it.  So, say it's
on a 6GB/hr HDTV channel and you have only 10GB available, you'd be
fine--and not lose any recordings--as long as there are no shows longer
than about an hour on the schedule.  But, when Myth got to that 4hr
show, it would start recording and--while still in progress--realize
that it needs to make more space, so it would have to delete some other
recording from the disk.  That means, since it can't delete the
in-progress 4hr recording, you'd lose some scheduled recording(s).

Mike