[mythtv-users] Why does Myth need write access to my Videos SG?

[Michael Watson]

On 20/09/2012 2:07 PM, Joseph Fry wrote:
>
>     > My videos directory is an SMB share and it is intentionally
>     read-only to my
>     > various media servers. I noticed that during Mythtv-setup, Myth
>     complained
>     > that it couldn't write to this directory. Can somebody tell me
>     what Myth
>     > needs to write to in here?
>     >
>     > Additionally I'm confused about the line in the wiki that says
>     "External
>     > Video Players (mplayer, xine, VLC) will not work with videos
>     hosted on an
>     > SG." - Does Myth actually modify the files in some way? This
>     would be
>     > catastrophic to me, as my videos are accessed by many different
>     > applications.
>
>     mplayer etc does not know how to play a myth:// url and therefore
>     cannot access the url that mthvideo hands off to the player. The file
>     is unchanged and you can still acess it outside myth via whatever
>     protocol works with your player - eg a mount over cifs.
>
> I believe that there have been several attempts at creating a fuse 
> virtual file system around the myth:// protocol, which would allow you 
> to mount your storage groups as you would any other drive... however I 
> don't think any of them are ready for prime time.
>
> With many players supporting upnp and mythtv's builtin upnp server, I 
> find that its rare that I need filesystem level access to my storage.
>
I have seen a wrapper script to convert the myth:// to a valid 
path/filename.
IMO I think its a bit premature to remove support for external players, 
when there is media that the internal player does not handle well.  (But 
I am just a lowly user, and our opinion matters not)
I also find that streaming via the myth:// protocol, some what laggy, 
and slow to start, where access to the same file via NFS starts almost 
instantly.