[mythtvnz] POLL: Disk space

[Steven Ellis]

Stephen Worthington wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Oct 2007 20:06:21 +1300 (NZDT), you wrote:
>
>   
>> How much disk space is in your backend machine and allocated to recordings
>> storage?
>>
>> I have a 250 Gb drive, and a 120 Gb drive for exported recordings.
>> OS is on a separate 40 Gb drive, all PATA IDE.
>>     
>
> I started with 2 x 500 GB SATA drives.  System is 5 GB, and the rest
> is JFS for Myth.  It filled up, so I added a 1 TB SATA drive a few
> days ago and moved my /myth/video to there, so now there is 22% free
> for recordings again.  I am not allocating any of the TB drive for
> recordings yet - I want to keep most of it free so that I can
> reorganise to use the new Storage Groups feature that should be in
> 21.0.  I can be recording 4 channels at once at times (and doing
> commercial scanning on them at the same time), so being able to make
> sure that the disk load is spread around all drives is a really good
> idea.  I also have around 220 GiB in programs that I recorded on the
> basis that I might find them interesting, and I have all that set to
> auto expire if necessary.
>
> I really ought to get around to transcoding everything, as I am taking
> up around 3.7 GiB per hour of recording.  But the last time I tried
> with the default settings the results were not very good - noticeable
> digital artifacts.  What I really want to be able to do is to
> transcode to 2 or 3 pass H.264/AAC format.  That should be able to
> give excellent results at about 1000 kbit/s.  But I never seem to find
> enough free time to get it working, so if anyone is having good
> results from transcoding, please share how you are doing it.
>
>   
You might want to bump the bitrate up on the transcode settings, but
transcoding from an analogue source always has issues if there is any
ghosting etc.

Generally I've found that the myPVR transcode settings work best on
digital material, and that the default transcoder looks roughly the same
as  broadcast.

One other option for some shows is to clip the beginning and end and use
the lossless transcoder to recover space.

I also find if I want to transcode material to HQ XVID then I use an
external tool, avidemux, where I can set filters to clean up the video
as part of the transcoding.

Steve

-- 
Steven Ellis - Technical Director
OpenMedia Limited
email   - steven at openmedia.co.nz
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support - support at openmedia.co.nz
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