Where to store PVR Recordings
I had set up a couple of Raspberry Pis with USB TV tuners. I installed the build-in TV headend server on both RP with tuners, configured the tuners, and then install the client for where I wanted live TV playback.
I tried to use the local SD card for recordings but found playback slow when forwarding or rewinding, and really sluggish if the unit was recording Live TV.
I had used very fast Micro SD cards and even tried overclocking a Model B unit.
I set the recording to use a cheap NAS drive I had and all the problems are gone.
The problem with the SD card is that they are used for all file I/O e.g virtual memory, apps, caches etc. so the Pi cannot cope with the CPU bound IO (USB delegates this work the CPU)
Normally data from recordings are stored in \storage\recordings but how could I change this to use the NAS?
How to use a NAS or Network Share from Openelec
I knew how to read media from network shared (SMB) but I need to
1) connect to the NAS
2) link a local directory to the NAS
It turns out this is also supported by OpenElec!
http://wiki.openelec.tv/index.php?title=Mounting_network_shares
So I created
/storage/.config/system.d/storage-smbrecordings.mount
Ran the command to create shortcuts to enable processing of the file on startup
systemctl enable storage-music.mount
Then did a restart and when I went to /storage/smbrecordings I could see a test file I'd copied to the NAS I wrote some files there and that worked too!
I then loaded the TVHeadend Setup Web Page for that RP and set the PVR Recordings directory to use \storage\smbrecordings
I did this for the other RP with a tuner and there is no problem recording and playing back content!
As the NAS drive <$100 is 2gb there is loads of space and its simple to copy files off for archiving.