Hello forum,

After trying various video capture programs for different Linux distributions, I finally got up enough nerve to try MythTV in Fedora Core 6. I am very pleased with MythTV as well as the quality of the recordings. It is by far the best TV/record software I have tried yet. I now have more respect for Linux than ever before.

I have a couple of questions concerning the operation of MythTV that I could not find using a search engine.

Question 1 - If I hit the "r" key on the keyboard while watching live TV, I understand that the live recording will then be flagged so it will not expire as quickly. My question is, will it ever expire? I am interested in making recordings that will be permanent. Is hitting the "r" key the proper (or best) way to do that?

Question 2 - When live TV is playing, the recordings in the storage folder never get over 1.1 gigabytes until a new mpeg is created, picking up where the old one stopped. Is there a way to make MythTV make one continous mpeg, like if I wanted to record a full length movie that would be about 5 gigabytes total in one single file? I am using the ext3 file system.

Question 3 - I am using MythTV in windowed mode, a nice little window on my desktop so I can still have room on my desktop to do other things while the TV is running. Is there a keyboard shortcut that will toggle the small window into full screen (and back again)? I would really rather not go through the setup configeration to do this.

I will appreciate anyone's help.

Thanks,
Roy

Im not in front of my MythTV box at the moment, so this is from memory.

1) You can, I believe record the program and then set it to "never expire" in one of the options screens for that recording. Just look through all the options, and you will find it somewhere. Another alternative is to burn the show to DVD if you want to keep it forever.

2) Live TV is recorded in a Ring Buffer, so that you can pause, rewind, etc. This ring buffer file is normally limitted in size so it doesn't fill up your hard drive. If you want to record the whole show, schedule it to be recorded and it will record it all. Also, try the XFS file system for your recordings partition (It is always best to have recordings on a separate partition, so that they don't fill your / partition). XFS is optimized for large files.

The best bet to learn MythTV is just to play with it, and see what all the options do.

I hope this helps
--Ian