I'm having a problem with R5F27 and my Xbox frontend. The frontend hangs if it's displaying the program list and a program is automatically expired.

As a workaround, I would like to force the backend to ensure that there is 20 hours of free space. I would schedule this to happen at 4am and then automatically reboot the Xbox shortly after.

By doing this, there would be very little chance of having to auto expire a program during the day - thus avoiding the problem.

Is there a way to force the backend to auto expire programs?

If I set AutoExpireExtraSpace to 40 will the expire process pick this up at some point and clear out the necessary disk space?

Then I could set AutoExpireExtraSpace back to 5 and not have to worry about auto expire happening for a while.

Would this work?

I looks like the expire thread will run every 10 minutes.

I think that the only thing that I need to figure out is how to signal the backend to reread the setting after the database is updated.

Any help on this?

The solution:

1. Set AutoExpireExtraSpace setting to 40.
2. Copy /etc/init.d/mythtv-backend to /usr/local/bin
3. Modify /etc/init.d/mythtv-backend to add the --noautoexpire arg.

Cron job kicks off a shell script at 4am which does the following:

/usr/local/bin/mythtv-backend restart
sleep 1200
/usr/local/bin/mythtv-backend restart

On the frontends, a cron job reboots the machine at 4:30am.