REQ: Set a custom path for "Remux active recordings"
#1
Hello Team ServerWMC,

Since ServerWMC works (almost) perfectly for our household, all the MCE machine made place for XBMC machines running OpenELEC.

Love it!

Yet I do get an above avarage amount of pixelation, which I partly blame XBMC's h.264 handling for. Yet I also feel like it's my HDD causing some artifacts.
Now I noticed that ServerWMC somehow forced ehrecvr.exe to write the WTV file to the TempSWMC folder. Also I found out that (with Remux active recordings on) the transportstream which is streamed to XBMC, is remuxed in the same folder.

Somehow I feel this reading and writing on the same physical HDD may cause some problems with the stream.

I was therefore wondering if it would be possible to set the remux path in the config. That way I could force the remuxed transportstream to another physical HDD.

It could look something like:

Image
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#2
Yes this has always been flagged as what we would do if/when somebody ran into HDD problems, however so far we haven't encountered anyone where it was definitively clear that they were running into IO bottlenecks. What HDD are you currently using? Have you tried using an SSD or something temporarily to validate that better IO performance will result in less pixilation issues for you? On my setup, ServerWMC is running on a VM and the recorded TV drive (and tempSWMC folder) are actually an iSCSI mounted drive on GB LAN to a Netgear ReadyNAS and I cant say I have IO related problems even when a scheduled recording is occurring simultaneously with 2 other live TV streams. My setup is not particularly optimised for good storage (compared to a dedicated local drive in a physical machine, a VM referring to a iSCSI drive over LAN surely isn't going to be as fast?) so Im just not sure whether basic use cases are running into IO issues.

We could certainly implement the suggestion but I guess my concern is that it may not actually resolve your issue and does add complexity meaning more stuff to go wrong for users (we have enough people have basic sharing/config/authentication issues with the single Recorded TV share at the moment, not to mention watched folders).
pvr.wmc TV addon and ServerWMC Backend Development Team
http://bit.ly/ServerWMC
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#3
Actually I have been thinking almost the same thing for the next rev. Not specific to active recordings only though, I was thinking of letting the user specify where the tempswmc folder is located - so that it doesn't have to be in the rec TV folder.

Like scarecrow says this adds complexity (besides the code headaches, the new tempswmc folder needs to be accessible by remote clients),. Due to this I wasn't planning on putting it on the GUI, but I love your mockup Ian. I was thinking to make it an option only in they config.xml and possibly forcing it to be specified as a UNC path, and doing the usual checks to make sure it is shared, etc.

This gives us more debug options for users who think they have a disk IO problem. Also we occasionally have issues with users running other software that monitors the recorded TV folder - this would give us a fix for this case too.

Thoughts?
Windows Media Center PVR addon (pvr.wmc) and server backend (ServerWMC)
http://bit.ly/serverwmc
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#4
In retrospect what I said won't work, only the remuxed ts files can be moved to remote volumes - just what IanPH proposed.
Windows Media Center PVR addon (pvr.wmc) and server backend (ServerWMC)
http://bit.ly/serverwmc
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REQ: Set a custom path for "Remux active recordings"0