Okay, right now my MythTV backend is all running on a single 1.5TB drive. I'm running low on space so I went out and bought a 2TB drive. Now I'm not sure what the best way to add this into my system is. In the past, I'd create and LVM because that seemed like the simplest solution. However, I got burned on that (one of the HDs failed and I lost EVERYTHING). Storage groups seems like a solution on the surface but if I'm understanding everything I read they are just for depositing recordings, not videos.

Any clever suggestions? I have a lot of video files in addition to less recordings. Thanks.

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LinHES 8.3, 1 BE, 3 FE

If you want to add another hard drive for videos (ie stuff you've copied, downloaded etc.) it's fairly straight forward.

Install HDD.
and give a file system.
Create a folder in myth e.g. /myth2 and mount the hard drive to it. When I did mine, I added a third hard drive and added it as /myth3 and put a video folder in it.

Once you've got it all set up, there is a box under >Service Menu>Setup>Media>Video>General which tells myth where to look for videos. Currently you will have /myth/video. Add your drive to it seperating with a colon. Like this -



Then myth will show you your videos in mythvideo.


-EDITED- To correct location of setting

HTH

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Version:R8
Intel C2D 7400, Nvidia 5600 via HDMI to Samsung B37B650TW (PAL), Asus P5QL-E mobo, 4Gb PC6400 DDR2 ram, Samsung Spinpoint 500 Gb & 1Tb drive, Nova-HD-S2 (x2)

Another option if it's in the LinHES repos is aufs:

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=314698
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aufs

...could have sworn someone in these forums posted about doing just this with aufs or something similar not too long ago.

EDIT: Yeah, it's in there albeit a bit dated in comparison to the one that comes with Arch.

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Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.

If you are running MythTV 0.22 out of -testing: http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/MythVideo_.2 ... age_Groups

Yeah storage groups are the way to go. You could give some space to tv recordings and mythvideo if you wanted to do so. I'm happy that LVM is a thing of the past for mythtv.

My only tip would be to make directories under the mount point. For example lets say your new drive partition is mounted on /mnt/storage2000, make a directory there "tv" owned by user mythtv. Then add to the storage groups for recordings using mythtv-setup the path /mnt/storage2000/tv. If you do this it will allow you to add another directory to then add to mythvideo if you want.

I am using storage groups for mythvideo too. The only problem is if you do use storage groups for mythvideo, then you must use the internal player. And the internal player has issues with playing DTS audio. The internal player for mythvideo/storage groups requirement should be fixed in 0.23. In the mean time you can stick with NFS and multiple directories for mythvideo if you cannot live with the Internal player. I re-encoded my videos that were DTS to AC3 to get around the problem.

The upside to using storage groups for mythvideo is the file browser in the front end. When you use NFS and multiple directories you get a "folder" for each directory. That works well until you go to add a new drive. For example say on your first drive you have a path /mnt/drive/movies/adventure because you like sorting out your video library by genre. Well lets say your drive is full and you add a second drive. You add another NFS path /mnt/drive2/movies/adventure. In mythvideo browser you will see two folders both labeled "adventure". Which is dumb if you are sorting by genre!

However if you use storage groups, mythvideo is smart enough to put both sets of movies into one folder in the browser. Much nicer and friendly to adding new drives and video cleanly.

Perhaps this is a bug but it's the way it behaves in 0.22.

Wow, it really looks like storage groups will be the way to go in 0.23. Unfortunately about 50% of my videos are ISOs and according to the notes on Mythtv.org those aren't supported in storage groups.

I guess for now I'll just use it as an NFS and hope that 0.23 comes out sooner than later.

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LinHES 8.3, 1 BE, 3 FE