I built a MythTV box in March follwing the "Cooking with EFF" instructions and it works wonderfully. (pcHDTV 3000, in a 3GHz P4 Shuttle XPC with an nVidia 5200). I live about half-way between San Francisco and San Jose and get great DTV reception of all the local stations with our old rooftop TV antenna.

I was wondering what folks are doing to archive HDTV programs. I've accumulated a number of programs in the 6 to 20 GB range that I'd like to save. I tried burning some of the smaller ones to DVD+R DL (8.5GB capacity), but mkisofs cannot handle files larger than 2 GB. (It "ignores" the file, resulting in a $7 coaster). I tried writing them to a USB2 drive, but FAT32 cannot handle files over 4GB. I know I can reformat the USB drive to ext3 (or jfs, or xfs, or reiserfs), but then I cannot mount the drive on a Windows or MacOS machine to watch the programs with VideoLan. NTFS will handle the larger files, but Linux mounts an NTFS read-only. Any ideas? Thanks.

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Aaron Heller <ajheller@gmail.com>
Menlo Park, CA US

I don't think that there is a good answer for this at the moment.

The thing is that the per Gb price of HD space is getting close to the cost of backup media Like DVDs. A year ago or so ago I was pricing 200Gb HDs at $0.50/Gb and DVD+Rs or DVD-Rs at ~$1 each or ~$0.22/Gb (not counting coasters). Both per Gb prices have seesawed downward with the best value point for HDs now at 250Gb and moving to 300-320Gb drives with $0.40/Gb prices or better appearing semi-regularly. (For example see: http://www.hotdealsclub.com/)

It's really starting to make sense to just throw more hard drive space at the problem...

1. Buy a high-capacity NAS device that can do SMB at a minimum, and preferably also NFS. RAID-5 is also a necessity. There are several on the market, the one I've got my eyes on is the Infrant ReadyNAS 600 (I plan to post about that on a separate topic).

2. You could stick with the USB 2.0 drive as there are several read-only and read/write ext2 drivers out there for Win2K/XP/2K3 machines, some GPL'd, some 'free', some commercial. Some are of dubious quality in that they served the author's needs but development stalled after that. Paragon does have a relatively cheap commercial product called Paragon Mount Everything that seems to work well in my experience. (Sadly, the same can't be said for their Partition Manager's ability to find all of the *valid* ext2 partitions on a drive with an overwritten partition table...but I digress).

-brendan