Topic: MythTV is a Personal Video Recorder (PVR) package available for Linux.

Q&A:

Q: If I have a capture card that encodes the TV in hardware, do I still have my recordings stored in Nuppel Video format?

A: No! I found this out from a buddy who has a Hauppauge PVR-250 (2 of them, in fact). The stored recordings are MPEG-2 files that are named with the .nuv

extension simply for consistency.

Q: Can I move recorded files around?

A: Well, yes and no. Here's the deal, MythTV keeps an entry in the MySQL database for the "recordings directory"

(eg. /MythTV/recordings for me). All recordings are expected to be in this directory. The file names follow a specific scheme.

For example, let's say I recorded Jay Leno last night (channel 4, July 14th, 11:35PM to 12:35AM). This channel and time

information is stored in one of my database tables. The corresponding NUV file on disk will be named something like 1004200507142335200507150035.nuv.

If you wanted to relocate all of your recordings to a new directory, you could do so and simply change your MythTV configuration to point to the new directory.

You could not, for example, move only some recordings and then expect MythTV to find recordings in 2 locations.

If storage space will present a problem, you can always create a logical volume (LVM - logical volume manager). This creates one virtual directory that

spans (potentially) multiple drives, where new drives can be added with no configuration changes.

Any other questions I didn't get to answer, or you thought of after the presentation? Feel free to e-mail me (jweir77 at gmail dot com) or Jeff (jeforde at gmail dot com).

-Jim 

Topic: WRT54G - A Discussion on installing custom Linux distributions on the WRT54G thus allowing it to do cool stuff.