Things I have learnt from using MP that might help others (1 Viewer)

[Peter Mee]

Hi JJ

Looks like we independently came to the same conclusions;

https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/...ion-of-1-tv-channel-continuity-errors.122818/

Following Saorview retune a couple of weeks ago, I had terrible reception on Mux1. Had to borrow a Saorview TV to establish the frequency discrepancy. Thanks for taking the time to put together an updated tuning file - will help us all in the future.

By the way, what size Ramdisk have you set up for timeshifting and how many simultaneous channels does it support?

Peter

 

[JJDoherty]

...Looks like we independently came to the same conclusions... By the way, what size Ramdisk have you set up for timeshifting and how many simultaneous channels does it support?

Hi @Peter Mee, yeah it does seem we arrived at the same place at the same time, the new mux probably plays a part in that too. To answer your question, I don't use a RAM disk, I have a SSD which seems to cope very well with the timeshifting buffer. All my other recordings and existing TV shows and movies reside on a 1TB Seagate HDD.

 

[Peter Mee]

To answer your question, I don't use a RAM disk, I have a SSD which seems to cope very well with the timeshifting buffer. All my other recordings and existing TV shows and movies reside on a 1TB Seagate HDD.

Sorry, mixed up your setup with that of OP.

 

[mm1352000]

...I have a SSD which seems to cope very well with the timeshifting buffer.

You know that using an SSD for timeshifting is not recommended, right? It will use up the write-erase cycles faster than necessary.

 

[Peter Mee]

Sorry I don't have 12 TV cards, I have 3 Quad PCI-E cards, which 2 of those are DVB-S2 and 1 is DVB-T2.

Mediaportal is fantastic. Its just like anything...taking the time to get to know it and understand how it functions. I was set on using Windows Media Center for a HTPC, but having switched to MP, id never go back. The options are unbelievable with MP and the support is also good.

I have a few things I need to address...but they are only small issues and 'tweaking'.

1) I want to centralize my movie and TV database as I am currently running TV series and Moving Pictures Plugins on my server and client. When I watch a TV episode in my bedroom it isnt shown as watched in my lounge. Ive looked into this but heard people getting corrupt databases etc.

Neil

I've set up MP-Sync on 1x server and 2x clients and it works great for me;

https://www.team-mediaportal.com/extensions/utilities/cdb-sync

It works by regularly copying the databases rather than shared access to a single DB and thereby gets around the lock issues that can happen.

Looking forward to MP2 where this will hopefully go away as an issue. I used to use Plex and loved the client/server model and it's the only thing I really really want to see in MP which is otherwise pretty much perfect!

 

[JJDoherty]

...I have a SSD which seems to cope very well with the timeshifting buffer.

You know that using an SSD for timeshifting is not recommended, right? It will use up the write-erase cycles faster than necessary.

Thanks @mm1352000. I did know that using the SSD for timeshifting might be "sore" on the drive but I thought it could be gotten away with, so-to-speak! So would you say that RAM disk is the way to go then? I have 4Gb on my setup would that be enough?

 

[mm1352000]

I suppose you could get away with using an SSD. It just depends how long you want it to last. The sorts of number that Anandtech throws around in some of its reviews suggest drives should go the distance even if you're writing an extraordinary amount of data. Take the latest Intel SSD review:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7438/intel-ssd-530-240gb-review
They say the drive is rated for 20 GB/day for 5 years => ~36500 GB lifetime writes. Of course that number varies from drive to drive based on the amount of spare area, the wear levelling algorithm, the write magnification, how compressible the data is, and the type of NAND... but if you take it as a rough estimate, and combine it with a channel bitrate estimate (assumption: video and audio is incompressible) - lets say an HD channel at 10 Mb/s => 1.25 MB/s => ~4.5 GB/hour => ~105 GB/24 hours... Basically, if one MP client timeshifts all day and all night everyday, they'd do roughly 5 times the number of rated writes and you could expect the drive to last about 1 year. The lifetime halves if two MP clients timeshift all day and all night; the lifetime doubles if the one person only watches for 12 hours a day etc. etc. etc. Another way of looking at it: to stay within the rating, clients could watch TV for a total of 5 hours per day (and the drive should last for 5 years).

YMMV

4 GB is on the small side for a RAM disk because you need to leave some RAM for the operating system. However, you don't have to worry so much about lifetime.

Your choice.

 

[JJDoherty]

@mm1352000, great post, very informative. Definitely food for thought there.

I am in the 5 hours a day range regarding TV watching but a RAM upgrade, to 8Gb, somewhere down the line might mean I can look at this again, after a period of time, implement a RAM disk then and add lifespan to the SSD. This is probably the middle of the road solution I'll go with for the time being at least. Thanks again...

 

[Pog]

I just use a hard drive and a slower 5400 RPM drive at that, low power and efficient. It's a 2TB drive split into 2 partitions with a 32GB partition for timeshifting and the remaining for recordings. The reason for the split is to keep file fragmentation to a minimum and I use a low power drive as my server is on 24/7.

I have had occasions where there has been 3 or 4 recordings going and multiple timeshift streams and it has never missed a beat. I use a server/client setup over a wired gigabit network. Channel change is fast at around 2 seconds.

I did consider a ram-disk at one point but having the bigger buffer using the hard drive means I can pause a hd tv stream for hours if needed and I do more often then I would have thought.

 

[Peter Mee]

DHCP

Don't have your single seat MP install on a computer that's set to obtain its IP address automatically.

This can confuse the poor dear.

I switched on my PC and found that TV channels that played fine yesterday no longer worked.

Log files were full of thrown exceptions and other horrendous notifications. After a bit of detective work (why so MANY log files?!?) I saw it was all boiling down to a series of 'unable to connect to slave controller at:' errors.

A quick search here revealed the cause and setting a fixed IP solved the problem.