DVD as backup to avoid delete button WAS: [mythtv-users] What NOT to do to your Myth box...

2005-01-15 Thread Michael Miyabara-McCaskey
Since I see that the original thread has been hijacked into create ways to
recover the data that was lost...

It seemed like many people were advocating transfering files to DVD, with
perhaps the preferred method as fully authored DVDs.

This brings up the issue I would love to know the answer to in mass which
is...

Are you doing:

1. Did you buy a $1k to $8k DVD Jukebox w/FireWire connect
(http://www.powerfile.com/) to your Mythbackend as pure mythfiles? (not
using fully authored DVDs)

2. Did you putting the new DVD on the shelf, and put it into your DVD
player (set-top or mythtv frontend) to replay the disk?

3. Did you buy an off the shelf DVD jukebox (Sony 200 or 400 capacity)?
Paul below says he did a direct connect to the TV input... Has anyone got
this setup working to the Myth Backend with/any existing Myth plugin?


-Michael


On Fri, 14 Jan 2005, Paul Kidwell wrote:

  -Original Message-
  From: Michael
 
  After you have finished the what appears to be a monumental set of tasks
  to get the DVDs authored...
 
  How to you access them? Do you just store them on the shelf?
 
  I myself was hoping for a solution to use cheap off the shelf Sony DVD
  jukebox - 400 DVD (1.56TB capacity - for $300)... that could be fed into
  the Myth backend, somehow... but haven't seen any response on a previous
  thread.

 I have a component video system. TV is set to video input (don't use tuner in
 TV) I have a  5.1 surround system receiver and have my Myth box set as video
 input 1, my VCR as video input 2, and have a Sony DVD changer (only 200 disk
 though) plugged into the DVD input.

 Paul


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Re: [mythtv-users] Dual processor any help?

2005-01-15 Thread Michael Miyabara-McCaskey
I'll throw in my 2 cents about topology, and let someone else answer the
exactness based upon Myth software itself (although it's likely that Myth
isnt multi-threaded, but it's possible, so someone else pop in on this).

1st, will it reduce your transcode time... if you were doing 'other'
things on the box at the same time.. then the easy answer is yes, it will
have some benefit.  i.e. if you were trying to watch something on the FE
at the same time you had the BE doing the transcode, then yes a dual CPU
setup will help your speed and/or remove jerkyness of the FE.

However... it wont be 2X as fast by any means... This comes down to if the
Myth modules are multi-thread away... I wouldn't think-so... but we can
both hope someone will respond. :-)

Btw, if you were not 'doing anything' else on that box, at the same time
you were transcoding, and someone responds that the Myth modules are not
multi-threaded... then you will still see some speed increase, be it
moderate, because you have 1 CPU dedicated to the transcode, and the
other, is running the OS, handling memory, disk IO, network IO, etc...

-Michael


On Sat, 15 Jan 2005, John Williams wrote:

 My myth FE/BE combined is a dual proc Intel P3 capable machine. I have
 a single 933 Mhz P3 in it now and was wondering if the adding the
 second proc would add any transcoding or nuvexport benefit. Right now
 I ran an nuvexport and the darn thing took all night to do a 1 hour
 show. obviously I don't want to archive my shows at that rate.

 I also plan on adding 2 front end machines to work with this back end.

 Any comments would be apprecitated.

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Re: [mythtv-users] What NOT to do to your Myth box...

2005-01-14 Thread Michael Miyabara-McCaskey
After you have finished the what appears to be a monumental set of tasks
to get the DVDs authored...

How to you access them? Do you just store them on the shelf?

I myself was hoping for a solution to use cheap off the shelf Sony DVD
jukebox - 400 DVD (1.56TB capacity - for $300)... that could be fed into
the Myth backend, somehow... but havent seen any response on a previous
thread.

Many have also mentioned doing RAID, but this only helps in the case of
HDD failures... As noted by this thread, there are plenty of ways to
accidently delete or corrupt your data.

Thoughts?

-Michael


On Fri, 14 Jan 2005, Scott Alfter wrote:

 On Fri, Jan 14, 2005 at 04:44:51AM -0600, John Williams wrote:
  I've gotten fairly good with a handful of Windows
   programs that make DVDs out of stuff ripped from my TiVo or my MythTV.
 
  What programs are you using for your windows archiving?

 I usually start by splitting the audio out of the MPEG program stream with
 DVD2AVI and decode it to WAV with LAME.  I then create an Avisynth script
 (using one of the MPEG-2 decoder plugins and the Decomb plugin) to mux the
 audio and video back together in something that VirtualDub can handle.  I
 use VirtualDub to find ad breaks and add those to the script, along with
 some frame resizing (from 480x480 to 720x480) and inverse telecine (if it's
 needed).  Edited audio is saved by VirtualDub to another WAV file, which is
 resampled to 48 kHz (if it's not there already) and normalized with sox and
 encoed to AC3 with BeSweet.  The edited video is reencoded (usually at a
 lower bitrate) with TMPGEnc.  The edited video and audio are then brought
 into DVDlab for authoring.  The set of VOBs generated by DVDlab is converted
 to an image file with DVD Shrink, which is then burned with DVD Decrypter.

 With the exception of TMPGEnc and DVDlab, all of these programs are free
 (mostly as in beer, though Avisynth, VirtualDub, LAME, and sox are free as
 in speech if it matters).  You should be able to track down all of the free
 stuff at Doom9 (http://www.doom9.net/).

 You might be able to speed up the progress significantly (and save some
 money) by (1) recording the video at 720x480 or 352x480 instead of 480x480,
 (2) using nuvexport to chop ads out, and (3) using DVD Shrink to transcode
 the video instead of using TMPGEnc to reencode it, but I've not tried this
 yet.  One significant difference I'd see in quality with this method is that
 you couldn't apply inverse 3:2 pulldown to those shows that need it.

 All this works fairly well for SD video grabbed from either TiVo or MythTV.
 You end up with standard DVD-Video content that plays in anybody's DVD
 player.  For HD video, you'd basically need to roll your own format at this
 point if you want to keep it HD.  If you want to convert HD to SD so you can
 burn it to DVD, you'll first need to convert the received transport stream
 to a program stream.  replex will do that:

 http://freshmeat.net/projects/dvb-replex/

 Once you have a program stream, you should be able to process it with the
 same tools listed above (though you'll need to add the AC3 decoder filter
 for Avisynth, since most (all?) HD broadcasts use AC3 audio).

   _/_
  / v \ Scott Alfter (remove the obvious to send mail)
 (IIGS( http://alfter.us/Top-posting!
  \_^_/ rm -rf /bin/ladenWhat's the most annoying thing on Usenet?


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Re: [mythtv-users] Is pchdtv3000 worth it?

2005-01-14 Thread Michael Miyabara-McCaskey
hehe...

Are you also making the assumption that AFTER June... no hacker in
the world will create something to defeat the broadcast flag?

:-)

-Michael

On Fri, 14 Jan 2005, Dan wolf wrote:

 You HAVE to get it before June, after that all cards will be
 restricted from what you can record.  This is the last model to have
 the ability to ignore the broadcast flag, so even if you are not going
 to use it, get it.  You will want it someday and they will be worth
 hundreds of dollars in a few years.  Its a good investment.


 On Fri, 14 Jan 2005 06:00:17 -0800 (PST), Julian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  Hi,
 
  Could anyone who uses or has analyzed the pchdtv3000
  say whether or not it is worth purchasing it at $189?
  Unless I could use it for more than Over the Air High
  Definition transmission, it seems overkill.  For one
  reason or another, I don't feel the potential for more
  than OTA is high.
 
  Thanks,
  Julian
 
  =
  Live simply so others may simply live.
 
  -Ghandi
 
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  Entities should not be multiplied unneccesarily
 
  -William of Occam
 
 
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Re: [mythtv-users] OT: LVM, partitioning over multiple drives

2005-01-13 Thread Michael Miyabara-McCaskey
RAID5, is simple math x + y = z, therefore the min is 3 drives... But
you lose 1 disk in the process... so 3 disks = lose 1/3rd... 4 disks =
lose 1/4th... etc... the max num of disks depends on the HW controller, or
for Software RAID on linux I dont believe there is a limit.

Obviously your usable space, gets better with the more drives you
have... Also RAID5 has very good read performance with larger block sizes,
which should do very well with large files... like video! yeah!

but

RAID5 write performance sucks, because it takes a fair amount of CPU to
calculate the parity (redundancy info) bits, during a write operation.
(which is why most servers doing RAID5 have their own CPU on the HW raid
card + memory to buffer the write operations).

Now if you have a dedicated FileServer, that isn't also your Myth Backend,
then it may be fine using Software RAID... and it would be the cheapest
way to get a large volume + redundancy.

-Michael


On Thu, 13 Jan 2005, Les Gondor wrote:

 At the cost of the aggregate space not being the sum of the capacity of
 the individual drives, the only way to get complete fault tolerance is
 to make the volume a RAID-1 or RAID-5 configuration. Since you are
 already at capacity on at least one spindle, I'm guessing that mirroring
 will cost too much in terms of capacity to be viable for you. I don't
 know what the minimum number of spindles are for LVM RAID-5, but for N
 drives of size S, the capacity will be (N-1)*S. I would count on at
 least 4 drives being needed for RAID-5.

 Cheers,
 Les Gondor

 Michael Knoll wrote:
  My video collection has expanded over multiple harddrives, and
  currently I'm using a symlink farm to unify the collection.  I was
  looking into LVM to join the drives into one partition, but I am
  concerned about the risk of failure.  If I join the two drives into
  one partition, I've added the failure risk.  Now either drive has to
  fail to lose all my data, rather then one drive fail to lose half my
  data.

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Re: [mythtv-users] DVD carousel or lots of HDD space?

2005-01-11 Thread Michael Miyabara-McCaskey
The PowerFile C200S is the only one I've seen.  200 disc's w/1394
firewire connection for about $1000 or the dual drive for $2000.

http://www.publishingperfection.com/powerfile/storage/24/


Which is why I'd rather do a regular DVD jukebox, 400 disks for $300...
maybe I should just ask the question about streaming, as this appears to
be my real question.


-Michael


On Mon, 10 Jan 2005, Robert La Ferla wrote:

 Sorry, no answer but I have a related question:

 Are there any DVD jukeboxes that have a ATAPI/SCSI interface for say
 less than $800?

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[mythtv-users] MythTV w/HD Sat or Cable? what hw to use? is the dolby preserved?

2005-01-11 Thread Michael Miyabara-McCaskey
Has anyone gotten a MythTV box, running with an external tuner, pulling
down HDTV signals from either Sat or Cable?

If so, what are you using to pull the feed into the MythTV backend
hardware wise?  (i.e. how are you getting the Dolby Digital COAX
or Optical + S-video/component video into the PC?)

Also, can the full Digital Audio (5.1) information, then be played back on
a remote MythTV frontend?

-Michael

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Re: [mythtv-users] The hardware database is not online....anyone have acopy/mirror of it?

2005-01-10 Thread Michael Miyabara-McCaskey
btw, it works fine in Mozilla 1.7.5

A co-worker here, using Firefox 1.0, it doesnt display any images, on the
PVD Hardware Database screens.

-Michael

On Mon, 10 Jan 2005, Anthony Vito wrote:

The http://pvrhw.goldfish.org/ is dead!
  
   You're using Mozilla, aren't you?  For some reason, it doesn't display in
   Mozilla broswers.  Pulls up fine in the evil browser, though.

 In firefox..

 That is odd... I right click open in new tab and nothing comes up...
 Then I click in the address bar after http://pvhw.goldfish.org/ and
 hit enter and it works fine.  Hope that helps.


 --
 Anthony Vito
 [EMAIL PROTECTED]

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[mythtv-users] DVD carousel or lots of HDD space?

2005-01-10 Thread Michael Miyabara-McCaskey
Hail Mythtv gurus,

I'm a total newbie to the world of PVR's and I've found only documentation
on HOW to do something with MythTV, I havent found anything on WHAT to do
with MythTV...

So... Here goes... I'll get my fireproof suit on now!  :-)  But please
tell me if I'm being silly or not on each option.


I'm thinking of setting up a system, that can use a Sony DVP-CX985 - 400
DVD jukebox ($300), as it's primary method of archiving recorded TV +
playing existing DVDs... (as I'm trying to avoid buying several terrabytes of 
HDD
space - as I have a collection of several hundred DVDs today).



Config#1: Basic PVR w/glorified frontend maybe?
 - Sony DVD connected directly to TV/speaker input#1.
 - Dish Network connected directly to MythTV host.
 - MythTV connected to TV  speaker system on TV/speaker input#2.
 - MythTV external receiver IR blaster to control Sony DVD.

Question on this option:
  Can MythTV be loaded with a list of the DVDs that I put into the Sony
DVD player?  From what I have read, the MythVideo module, is what would
be used to play these back, as well as annotate the IMDB info on each line
item... Can MythVideo act as a pass-through IR blaster?

PROs:
 * DVD-RW media is cheap plus no crashed HDDs to worry about.
 * Video  Sound go direct to TV, so quaility should be great.

CONs:
 * Dont know if the mythvideo module can work as a dummy pass-through
of IR commands to the Sony DVD player.
 * In this method no additional TVs can use the video on the DVD player.
 * Dont know if I could get the IR blaster to change my inputs correctly.
 * Just seems cludgy, just doesnt sound like a MythTV setup.


Config#2: Streaming through MythTV w/Dolby Digital?
 - Sony DVD video connected directly to MythTV capturecard#1 (s-vhs).
 - Sony DVD audio connected directly to MythTV soundcard#1 (dolby coax).
 - Dish Network connected directly to MythTV capturecard#2.
 - MythTV connected to TV  speaker.
 - MythTV external receiver IR blaster to control Sony DVD.

Question on this option: Can MythTV take video from 1 card, and
sound from another card, re-integrate into a stream, and fire it back out
to the TV and speakers still including the Dolby Digital?  Also same
question as in config#1 above.

Sounds Card: Creative Labs Audigy 2 ZS Platinum??  cuz it has lots of
in/outs for Dolby Digital.

Capture Card: Something that can handle 2 - sources?? or just buy 2
cards?  any recommendations as to which one(s)?

PROs:
 * DVD-RW media is cheap plus no crashed HDDs to worry about.
 * Only need the TV/Speakers on 1 input source forever

CONs:
 * Dont know if the mythvideo module can work as a dummy pass-through
of IR commands to the Sony DVD player.
 * In this method no additional TVs can use the video on the DVD player,
unless streaming can be done from MythTV backend to frontends... which
leads to config#3.



Config#3: Streaming w/Dolby Digital to MythTV backend.  Playback on at
multiple locations?
 - Same as above, except pretend I split just the MythTV connected to TV
 speaker to 1 or more hosts.

Question on this option: Can the streaming be done to a MythTV backend and
therefore a MythTV frontend can pick it up?  and if 1 frontend can pick it
up, can several pick it up via multi-cast or something similar?



Dont you guys love newbie questions?

Thanks in advance for any info you can give.

-MyKarz

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