networked drives?

[thisguy]

I have recently got my PVR up and running thanks in part to this site (I've read quite a bit before joining). I'm using to GB-PVR along with a PVR-250 and the MediaMVP. I have the GB-PVR software running on one computer that currently has two hard drive in it (that are both filling up quickly). Before I go out and buy a new hdd (external perhaps), I was wondering if it is possible to record to a network hard drive running on another computer. I tried last night with no success. The other computer has two drives as well, one contains the OS (both are Win XP), and the other is completely blank. I tried just typing in the path under directories as the recording destination, so it looked like this
\\othercomputer\d\videos

When that didn't work, I tried mapping the network drive on my main computer as the R drive
R:\videos

That didn't work either. Anyone have any experience with this? Has it worked and I'm screwing something up, or is it not supported?

Thanks,
Guy

[sub]

It should work, but I havn't tried it.

Its important to remember that the recording service runs as another user account, so it probably wont be able to see your drive mappings. You could try configuring the service to run as yourself, which will hopefully mean it uses you drive mappings.

[thisguy]

Quote[/b] (sub @ Oct. 19 2004,15:53)]"Its important to remember that the recording service runs as another user account"

Could you explain that? I'm not sure I understand fully. The account that I was logged in as when I mapped the drive is the same account I was in when I tried to set GB-PVR up to record to it.

I guess I'm confused.
Thanks,
Guy

[sub]

The GB-PVR front end runs as you, but the recording service runs as special Windows user called 'local system'.

[pancapangrawit]

O.k. for me it also doesn't work - and GBPVR doesn't tell that the recording fails. Its just not there.

Recording is done by a so called service, which usually runs in the background and starts automatically, even if you aren't logged in. That's why GBPVR can record without yourself having to be logged in and also without the frontend of GBPVR running.
This service so to say has it's own login, in the case of GBPVR its the Local System Account, a special account built into Windows and used by most system-services. That account has special rights. But the rights of the system account do not include writing to a shared folder from a different machine. Anything written to that machine must run under a login that is accepted by the remote machine. I don't think it's possible to give the system account of a remote computer access-rights to a share. So the alternative, as sub proposes is, to run the gbpvr recording service with a different account, e.g. your personal account which has write-rights on the remote share. That should work (and shouldn't have negative side-effects if it's an administrator account on your local machine), please try it and report back. You can set the Logon of a service in system-management. One way to access that is right-click any inbuilt My Computer-icon and chose 'manage'. You will find the services in the lower portion of the left tree. Then look for the gbpvr-service in the right list, right-click/options and choose Log On. Good luck.
Best
.r.

[pancapangrawit]

He he, this made me curious, so I tried it myself. It does work! It will need some checking of course, e.g. will it also work when you record from two cards at the same time, which network-capacity do you need, etc...

I also checked whether the file could be played back on the remote machine while it's being recorded. It was not possible with MS-Mediaplayer 10 and with Mediaplayer Classic but it was possible with Zoom-Player. Yet Zoom-player wouldn't read in the file dynamically, you could just watch the portion that was allready present on the drive, when you started watching. I wonder whether there is a setting for that in Zoom-Player. Would be cool to have sort of a time-shifting on a remote machine. Next I'll check Zoom-Player reading from a remote drive from a file that's still being written to.

Best
.r.