For the last few years I have been using BTV for my dvr software. (Love it)

My old setup would wake up the computer 5 min before recording started and then spun up my ready made NAS box on my network. Then recorded to a specific folder that was mapped as Z:tvshows

 

well i tried to do the same with my new unraid server and weird sh@t is happening. I have a user share folder video mapped as Y:video. Under the video folder i have another folder TVshows.

y:Video\tvshow

 

with beyond tv I have the folder mapped as Y:tvshows which didn't make sense to me but that was what the path listed it as. I set the recording time and spun down all my drives.

what happened was that the HTPC woke up, then spun up my cache drive (good) and added an info folder to the Tvshow folder then BTV stopped working.

 

Actually 1st time I got the Blue screen of death and 2nd time BTV just said I needed to run setup wizard (most likely a folder problem.

 

Since the Y:video directory did not make sense to me I then just mapped it directly to the tower.

//tower/video/tvshows.

 

I will see tonight if this works! I might also try Y:video/tvshows, which make more sense to me. What I think is happening is BTV is getting confused with the folder. I hope to get this resolved and any insight from more experienced users would be helpful. So far this comunity has been great and very patient with a newbie (just to unraid) like me.

 

What are others doing for DVR and Unraid that works for OTA HDTV? Directories?

 

Thank you

          Larry G

I've been running BeyondTV for a couple years and am very happy with it.  However, I've never been able to get it to work reliably with paths to my unRaid box.  I tried both using a Windows mapped drive and using UNC within BeyondTV, which I think is their recommended approach.  All I can say is good luck and please post any results.

That is unfortunate the you could not get it to work either. I'lll mess around with the mapped and UNC paths but i'm not going to sweat too much over it. Just bought 3 more 1TB HDD and I'll most likey drop one of the 5400rpm WD drives in my HTPC and use that for my DVR only.

 

We shall see!

Not sure if this has anything to do with it. But I was just reading that MythTV does not work with ReiserFS, you will always get corrupted recordings. Maybe this applies to all DVR software not only MythTV. I think the big issue could be unknown file size when recording starts and space is being allocated. People that know ReiserFS should be able to clear this up. One other statement I saw it said that RasierFS does not work very well with files bigger then 4GB, can anyone explain this reasoning? Thanks.

http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-3.html#ss3.1  see section Filesystem.

to record to your server from windows, use symlinks:

 

mklink /d RecordedTV \\server\disk2\RecordedTV

 

just make sure you don't try to do much on the windows box with the server down

 

Not sure if this has anything to do with it. But I was just reading that MythTV does not work with ReiserFS, you will always get corrupted recordings. Maybe this applies to all DVR software not only MythTV. I think the big issue could be unknown file size when recording starts and space is being allocated. People that know ReiserFS should be able to clear this up. One other statement I saw it said that RasierFS does not work very well with files bigger then 4GB, can anyone explain this reasoning? Thanks.

http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-3.html#ss3.1  see section Filesystem.

Hmm, that's a bit alarming...

It does say at that link

 

** NOTE: You must not use ReiserFS v3 for your recordings. You will get corrupted recordings if you do.

and

** Filesystems known to have problems with large files are FAT (all versions), and ReiserFS (versions 3 and 4).

 

I've not had any issues storing my ISO dvd images on the system via SMB.

I would think if others had issue, it would have come up by now.

 

maybe because myth is writing to the disk, and we are writing through Samba?

 

Not sure if this has anything to do with it. But I was just reading that MythTV does not work with ReiserFS, you will always get corrupted recordings. Maybe this applies to all DVR software not only MythTV. I think the big issue could be unknown file size when recording starts and space is being allocated. People that know ReiserFS should be able to clear this up. One other statement I saw it said that RasierFS does not work very well with files bigger then 4GB, can anyone explain this reasoning? Thanks.

http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-3.html#ss3.1  see section Filesystem.

Can't comment on why they think files larger than 4Gig are a problem with ReiserFS, they are not.  I've got about 800 or so of that size.

 

The corruption to MythTV recordings might be due to the kernel level lock used by Reiserfs.   This would prevent writing on a timely manner by MythTV.

 

The reiserfs wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReiserFS) says:

However, because ReiserFS still uses the Big Kernel Lock (BKL) — a global kernel-wide lock — in some places, it does not scale very well for systems with multiple cores, as the critical code parts are only ever executed by one core at a time.[2]

 

It will be interesting to see if the SMP processing helps much at all with heavy writing to the array.

 

Joe L.

 

PS.

This is the exact same lock I think is at the root cause of network I/O stopping while the pdflush processes are writing the disk cache to the physical disks.

 

Perhaps at some point Tom will support other file-systems besides ReiserFS...  We'll then know if it has been the limiting factor for smooth network I/O while pdflush is active.

The 2GB and 4GB file size problem can occur, even if the filesystem supports it.  For example, if the application is written in a language with 32bit unsigned integers, and use an unsigned int for the file offsets, you get fubar despite the fact that the filesystem supports larger files.

 

For example, I use a php package getid3 in my home-grown media serving app, and it chokes on files greater than 2GB as php uses signed ints for the file offsets / size.

 

Theoretically, I could recompile php, and apache for largefile support and 64bit file offsets, but I have more important things to do with my time.  Such a compileer directive may be needed for you HTPC app.

FYI, I spent 2 nights messing around with it to get recording to work with BTV. No luck!

I ended up just dropping a 1 TB drive in my HTPC and be done with it. It is more than enough storage for my DVR usage.

 

I'm acually glad I did too because I ended up usung a 5400rpm WD green drive that is soooo much quieter than the Seagate 7200 job that was in there.

Since my HTPC is watercooled the only thing I used to hear is the Seagate seaking. Now I hear nothing!