Recording 4 Channels at the same time

[Mike1]

I have a question I have just finished building my computer to run GBPVR. I have 2 Duel tuner cards im trying to configure GBPVR to record NBC, ABC, CBS and FOX 24 hours a day save the files for 48 hours then overwrite them. Does anyone have any ideas on what is the easiest way to configure GBPVR to do this.

Thanks for the help

MIke

[whurlston]

Wow, you are talking about nonstop writes to the drive. You will burn a drive fairly fast that way.

The quickest/easiest way would probably be to try using this utility in a batch file: http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php?t=33219

You could set it in your UpdateEpg.bat to write to a folder each day and also set a "del /s" command to remove all other days files.

[Deusxmachina]

Heck, I'm curious why someone would want to record four channels for 24 hours a day! I can think of various reasons, but it'd be nice to hear the real one.

Should last ok with plenty of cooling, I would think. Maybe.

[whurlston]

Should last ok with plenty of cooling, I would think. Maybe.

Still a lot of wear and tear on the drive. I install DVRs for a security company and there is a reason they only offer 90 day warranties. We usually have to look into replacement drives within a year if the DVR is set to record constantly and not on motion sensing activation.

[zehd]

It sure would be nice to have a tuner set to go to its own drive.. Like it's own recording directory...

[K.S.]

I have a question I have just finished building my computer to run GBPVR.

as the previous posts say, it's asking for HD failure
there is only one thing you could do to avoid that but that might be to late as you already have your machine...
only solution to avoid HD failure:
- stick as much RAM as possible in your setup (you'll definitely need more than 4GB, so you'll also need the 64bit version of XP/Vista)
- create a RAM drive with about 6GB (don't know if vista supports these, XP does) & set it as recording dir. you'll need about 1GB per hour of SD recording.
- use the command line scheduler (from the current release) to record only 1 hour
- after that hour, move the file from ramdisk to HD

thats the only way to keep the HD from continuos spining around. you would definitely need some batches to move the files around (postprocessing.bat) & delete them after 48 hours. btw: it's overkill

[pBS]

if you use ntfs file system on drives,[you should for many reasons] to record to separate drives, since you already know the shows names, you could create 'hard-links' to point certain directories to other drives...

so say you have 4 show titles/dirs, setup hard links for those dirs and point them to different drives...that way, when recording to say, e:\recordings\fox, it would go to whatever drive you made the hardlink of that dir to...

only works with ntfs file system on recording drives..
but it should make this very workable..
[only 1 recording to any drive at a time, all shows would be on their own drive, but look like all in same drive to gbpvr and system]

[forzaKGB]

Another thing to consider is the type of drive, with this solution I would recommend a SAS/SCSI drive and not a SATA.

The SAS and SCSI (and for that matter FC, but htat would not be necessary at home) drives are built to take 24/7 heavy duty use and SATA is built to be used office hours and not at a heavy duty cycle. So I would never trust a SATA-drive to do this kind of work.

Another thing you get going down the SCSI path is Command line Queing. Yes, SATA also has queing but it's not at all the same thing as SCSI/SAS/FC.

[K.S.]

if you use ntfs file system on drives,[you should for many reasons] to record to separate drives, since you already know the shows names, you could create 'hard-links' to point certain directories to other drives...

does that work on different drives? i thought hard links only worked on the same drive letter in windows?

[mvallevand]

does that work on different drives? i thought hard links only worked on the same drive letter in windows?

Vista lets you create links to different drives.

Martin