One of the MythTV devs, JYavenard, said this on another forum a few hours ago:

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* Asus M3N78-EM, AMD 5050e, Nvidia 8300 IGP, QNAP TS-439 Pro II, Linhes 7.4

I'm excited by 0.25's content but I'm also cautious. I'm not convinced it is stable enough for GA and I will wait for it to bed in a bit.

For the more adventurous out there, I'm sure many of us would be curious about your own experiences. Perhaps my concerns are unwarranted.

I am somewhat cautious...

I have had too many issues as of late. I was running Mythbuntu 8.10 more than a few years ago on a P4 system with 3 PVR150's, and all was well. Then a flood threatened my community, and I had to move all my computer equipment to higher ground. a few months ago, I decided to fire everything backup and I decided while I was going to all the trouble to re-install the servers and clients, I would upgrade to the latest edition. I then started to have trouble with LiveTV and my PVR150's...what I believed to be the most stable of all tuner cards. Apparently, not too many developers are really worried about the old analog tuners like the PVR150. Everything is going digital, so no one should really need analog anymore - right? Wrong!!! My local cable provider transmits all the basic channels using analog frequencies, and they have told me that they have no immediate plans to change that.

The trouble I ran into was that the analog channels would produce artifacts and digital rendering distortion. I would also get errors saying that the buffer was being starved...I forget the exact error message. I then tried other distributions, and stumbled on LinHES. Although I had initial problems (could not boot LinHES unless the Hyperthreading was disabled on my P4), the picture produced by my PVR150's was the best I had ever seen and it was stable.

Well, with the newer version of MythTV now running reliably, I found a few things I didn't like...none of which are the fault of LinHES, but rather decisions made by the MythTV developers. Chief among them is Storage Groups. I don't really understand the need for them. Storage is really basic, although I am personally still struggling with the permissions and access with Arch. I used DVD ISO's and Mythtranscode a lot. With storage groups, these items are less useful and less convenient. I have to convert my DVD's to ISO's using DVDFab or DVD95 on other systems, and not on my LinHES loaded backends. In addition, I cannot load any encrypted ISO's from a storage group...another pain, although I believe that all the DVD to ISO utilities are also rendering the ISO's unencrypted, but there is really no way I can tell that for sure, so maybe loading them from SG's is not really the limitation I think it is.

I am hoping for some clarity with respect to MythTV 0.25 and Storage Groups, as it pertains to DVD ISO's, although the additional features 0.25 brings may compensate for lack of Mythtranscode and the issues surrounding DVD ISO's.

The major advantage of storage groups is the ability to have your recording storage span multiple disk drives without having to use LVM. LVM generally ran the risk that if one drive died, you lost all your recordings. This is not an issue with storage groups. Also, with storage groups you can spread your recordings out across a combination of local and networked storage.

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Marc

The views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

Can you control which files are placed on network storage within storage groups? Network storage is always going to be slower and you will always want certain files local as opposed to on the network.

Wow, It has experimental Airplay support? That's pretty awesome...

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LinHES 8.3, 1 BE, 3 FE

Last I read they have an algorithm that attempts to automatically decide where to put recordings based on several factors include utilization, access speed, number of recordings expected to be going on at that time, etc. I believe there is a way you can tweak the weightings, but my recollection is that what they did seems reasonable. I believe the explanation is somewhere in the mythtv wiki -- don't recall where as I read the writeup some time ago...

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Marc

The views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

Here is the wiki article that explains storage groups. Here is a key quote


There are actually 3 different balancing algorithms that are explained in this section of this wiki article.

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Marc

The views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

From what I recall you can play unencrypted ISO files from storage groups in 0.24. I have not yet tried it myself. The only reason I haven't gone to storage groups myself is that I still need mplayer from time to time and my cifs mounts are already in place. Eventually they will force us off of network mounts and into storage groups.

So far .25 box has been running pretty well. I have an HDPVR attached. I hand roll my systems from scratch including Qt and have not seen most of the issues on the mailing lists. Apparently there was a lot of IVTV bugs before release that I didn't see. I have a Ceton card that I'm struggling to get working right but I think its due to the DRM copy once and not myth itself was my main motivation for .25.

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MBE/FE: Source 24.2, AMD 64 X2 4400+ 2gb 1.5 Tb Dual PVR 500 + Motorola STB
MBE: R6, AMD 64 X2 4400+ 3gb 2 Tb HDPVR + Motorola STB
FE: Custom AMD FX 55 2 Gb
Dev: Custom 0.25 from source MBE/FE

I continue to try storage groups for ISO files with every release and I continue to return to NFS. I find a significant reduction in performance whenever I try to play any ISO file. Storage groups in Myth .25, although better, are still not acceptable to me - it does work well for all other file types (at least the basic ones that many people use). Most of my library is ISO and I am not willing to change...

Just my 2₵...

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nbdwt73