[mythtv-users] better scheduling options through MythWeb?

[Stephen Worthington]

On Thu, 07 May 2015 22:54:02 -0400, you wrote:

>On 05/07/2015 10:39 PM, Stephen Worthington wrote:
>> Being able to automatically cut out ads is also a wonderful dream, but
>> it remains just that as the variety of ways ads are done prevents
>> anything like 100% detection of them.  Even a 1% error rate will cause
>> bad WAF if bits of a favourite program go missing.  Here in New
>> Zealand, the available detection algorithms in MythTV are pretty
>> useless, and you are lucky to 50% detection.
>
>However, on the bright side, 3TB HDDs for $85 ($28.33/TB--and there are 
>probably better deals than that, but that's just one I'm seeing now) and 
>MythTV's ability to skip over commercials using information from 
>commercial detection make the idea of cutting commercials out 
>unnecessary for TV shows you record.  Especially when you live in an 
>area (such as the US) where time shifting is allowed under fair use, but 
>"librarying" or "archiving" (keeping copies indefinitely to watch or 
>potentially watch multiple times) is not--which means you'll be watching 
>and deleting the show, anyway--cutting commercials is just a waste.  
>Besides, if I like the show enough that I want a copy to keep, I want 
>one that doesn't have logos/bugs/weather and news alerts/... that appear 
>all too often on broadcast shows, so I buy it on DVD or BluRay.
>
>And, yes, I do realize that other areas of the world will have different 
>pricing on hard drives, but as dirt cheap as they are in the US, I can't 
>imagine storage being actually expensive elsewhere.
>
>Mike

The cheapest 3 Tbyte drives here in New Zealand seem to be the WD
Green ones, and from a reputable retailer they are NZ$185.05 =
US$135.62:

  http://www.ascent.co.nz/productspecification.aspx?itemID=396411

So not quite so cheap here, but not bad.  Of course, I have run out of
SATA ports, so I have been buying 6 Tbyte drives, but even they are
not too expensive:

  http://www.ascent.co.nz/productspecification.aspx?itemID=424875
  http://www.ascent.co.nz/productspecification.aspx?itemID=425021

I prefer the Red drive as it is 24x7 rated and is actually lower power
than the Green.

This is my free space report today:

Recording space
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb3       3.7T  3.5T  128G  97% /mnt/rec1
/dev/sdd2       2.7T  2.6T  132G  96% /mnt/rec2
/dev/sda5       2.7T  2.5T  128G  96% /mnt/rec3
/dev/sdc1       2.8T  2.6T  133G  96% /mnt/rec4
/dev/sdn1       2.8T  2.7T  130G  96% /mnt/rec5
/dev/sdm1       3.7T  3.6T  134G  97% /mnt/rec6
/dev/sdi1       5.5T  5.4T  133G  98% /mnt/rec7
total            24T   23T  916G  97% -

so you can see that I have been following Mike's suggestion and just
adding more storage as needed for a very long time.

And 8 and 10 Tbyte drives are not too far away now and are likely to
follow the same sort of pricing.  This is already available in NZ:

  http://www.ascent.co.nz/productspecification.aspx?itemID=429518

but unfortunately seems to be unsuitable as a MythTV recording drive
due to its SMR recording technology causing wildly variable write
speeds with the slow end of the range likely to cause recordings to
fail.  But it would work as a "read only" drive, where recordings were
moved to by a script at a later time, so I have been considering how I
might use one as the price is certainly attractive.