I have read some about storage groups and still don't know if I fully understand how they work, but I have noticed something very nice, it seems with LinHES, as opposed to other MythTV distributions. It seems that the remote FE's have NFS connections to the Master BE's auto-magically provided. If this is a MythTV feature, then I have been away from MythTV too long (came from version 0.21). If this is a feature of LinHES, then I have to compliment the developers on that one - good job guys!

My question is if I should enable storage groups to store my DVD ISO collection, or if I just just mount a NFS link to one of my NAS boxes, or a local RAID box and mount it to the video folder under Myth? I know a locally connected (via eSATA) RAID box will give the best performance, but how much throughput does one really need to stream the content to remote FE's. I can see if we are able to get Blu-Ray ISO's to play directly in Mplayer someday, but with DVD's, what is really the best approach, considering that playing ISO's (non-encrypted or just encrypted) via storage groups is not supported, or is it? Am I making any sense, or am I writing this too late at night?

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

The NFS mount is LinHES specific so thank the LinHES devs for that (oh wait, you did!).

Storage Groups have come a long way in 0.24 and to be honest, I've been on the edge of converting to it. In theory you can use both Storage Groups and network mounts at the same time so you can use mplayer as a fallback. The mythtv team is planning to phase out anything but storage groups soon.

As of 0.24 ISO's should be playable in storage groups.

The only reason I haven't switched to storage groups yet is because having recently moved to 0.24 (LinHES 7.2) I want to to see if I can completely use the internal player and not reply on mplayer.

I see what you mean. I have also read somewhere that in order to use the internal player for Myth with SG's that the ISO's have to be unencrypted. I Have used either DVD95, K9Copy, or DVDFab to create the ISO's, but I do not know if any of them remove the DVD encryption when the DVD ISO Is created. Does anyone know for certain?

Also, I have seen some issues with using the internal player, such as the subtitles not always working. I have tried using the alternate player, which is Mplayer, but the remote buttons must not be configured yet under Mplayer. How do you configure the buttons for the remote, but just for Mplayer? Another little side configuration.

If you do not use Storage Groups, how do you, for example, store live TV and recorded TV files on a larger drive? Or do you have to use the storage group setup for "default" and add the second drive or simply change the folder to the other drive???

You can customize lircrc to add what you need for mplayer. Some older lircrc files may not have what you want. I use the lircrc from the imon template which has all the mplayer configs I need. You can customize further if you want. See also http://linhes.org/projects/linhes/wiki/Remotes#Tips to understand how to preserve these changes by adding a custom remote entry.

Does anyone have any recommendations? Storage Groups, add a hard disk, NFS, CIFS? If so, what commands did you use and which configuration files on the FE / BE did you need to modify?