[vdr] Re: Drop support for multiple video dirs? [was: FeatureRequest]

[Carsten Koch <Carsten.Koch@icem.com>]

Klaus Schmidinger wrote:
...
> What I would really like to do is to get rid of this
> altogether! I shouldn't have implemented this "spreading
> recordings over drives and linking them together" in the
> first place, but at the time it seemed like a useful idea.
As I have said already in the past: I am sorry I talked you
into this back then. I have used it only for a very short time.

As soon as you had implemented subdirectories, this became
obsolete. I created a top level entry for each genre in /video.
Some of them are actual directories in /video and some are
symbolic links to other mount points.

Here is what it currently looks like on my vdr:

vdr /home/cko> df -hTl
Filesystem    Type    Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2      xfs    114G   92G   23G  81% /
/dev/hdb1      xfs    153G  144G  8.9G  95% /video2
/dev/hdc1      xfs    153G  134G   19G  88% /video
/dev/hdd1      xfs    153G  145G  8.1G  95% /video3
shmfs          shm    189M     0  189M   0% /dev/shm
vdr /home/cko> ls -l /video
total 5504
lrwxrwxrwx    1 cko      users          14 2003-04-05 05:22 Action -> /video2/Action
drwxr-xr-x   35 cko      users        4096 2003-09-29 00:22 Comedy
lrwxrwxrwx    1 cko      users          19 2003-04-15 22:05 Fantasy -> /video4/vdr/Fantasy
lrwxrwxrwx    1 cko      users          14 2003-04-05 05:22 Horror -> /video3/Horror
lrwxrwxrwx    1 cko      users          12 2003-04-05 05:22 Kids -> /video3/Kids
drwxr-xr-x    8 cko      users         140 2003-09-23 01:23 Misc
lrwxrwxrwx    1 cko      users          13 2003-04-05 05:22 Music -> /video3/Music
drwxr-xr-x   13 cko      users        4096 2003-10-03 02:39 SciFi
lrwxrwxrwx    1 cko      users          15 2003-04-05 05:22 Science -> /video2/Science
lrwxrwxrwx    1 cko      users          16 2003-04-05 05:22 Thriller -> /video3/Thriller
-rw-r--r--    1 cko      users     5625013 2003-10-03 15:55 epg.data

Note that Fantasy points to a lower-level directory on the root disk,
while some of the others just point to top-level directories on the
/video2 and /video3 disks. vdr of course only sees /video.

For me, this is a nice and flexible solution.

The only concern I have with the current vdr is: when one of
these disks becomes full, will vdr run amok and delete old
recordings randomly from just any disk or will it follow my
symbolic links and only delete recordings from the disk that
actually became full?



> Meanwhile disks are available in very large sizes, and if
> someone really needs enormous amounts of disk capacity,
> its probably a better idea to use a RAID approach.
If I use raid level 5, it would cost me an extra disk,
if I do not, it will be as bad as the multiple video dirs.


> And even without support for several /video directories
> you could still have several disks mounted under the top
> level /video directory and store your recordings on the
> various disks.
In some cases, that may be an alternative.
It is not as flexible as the symbolic link solution
I described above.


> So here's my proposal: if nobody objects I'd like to
> drop the support for multiple /video directories in
> version 1.3. If necessary I can provide a script that
> converts an existing linked /video0, /video1,... structure
> into a plain directory structure.
>
> Any comments?

I hereby vote for that.

Carsten.



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