[vdr] Re: Slightly OT: How to share two video directories ?

[Emil Naepflein <Emil.Naepflein@philosys.de>]

On Sat, 14 Dec 2002 12:06:18 +0100, Helmut Auer <vdr@helmutauer.de>
wrote:

> Its more a linux than a vdr question, but the reason it is VDR :-)
> I have two VDR machines which are not always turned on, and I want to 
> see the
> recordings of  both machines on both machines.
> Both share their video directory, but when I mount it and create a link 
> in the video directory
> that would not work, because of  recursive directories.
> Is there a way to hide the mountpoints, or what dio I have to do  ?

There is no easy solution for this. The problem is that not both
machines are always running. So mounting the video directory may cause a
hang. Also shutting down one of the machines may crash the other. 

I have a similar but less complicated situation here. I have a central
server with 4 DVB cards doing recordings which is shutting down when
nothing is to do. Two clients which do no recordings access the server
through NFS. Wakeup-on-LAN is used by the clients to wakeup the server
if necessary. The runvdr script checks whether the server is up before
trying to mount the servers video directories. This avoids hanging the
clients. So immediately after the clients have started up the recordings
menu shows no recordings. After a few minutes the video directories are
mounted and all the recordings can be accessed. As long one of the
clients is running the server doesn't shutdown to avoid hanging the
client.

Having two servers like in your case isn't so easy to handle. After
mounting the other servers video directory at a different path you have
to generate the same directory structure in your local video directory.
As you seem to have only a single /video there are no problems with
symbolic links pointing to secondary directories. So it should be fine
to create a symbolic link for the base directory of the recordings. I
don't know whether VDR does any special checks, but it is certainly
worth a try.

It would be much better to have a sharing functionality within VDR
instead of relying on NFS or other network filesystems. VDR could know a
list of servers which are contacted when they are up for a list of
available recordings when you press the recordings button. And when
playing back the recordings can be transfered directly by vdr to the
client through a kind of remote transfer mode using tcp.
Something similar can be done by providing a remote timer menu which
allows clients to program timers on a central server. 

This all would allow a much simpler setup for distributed VDR systems.

Emil 


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