Anyone recording HD MythTV to a network share?

[jeangot]

Hello,

I have the following situation. I am using a SA4250 Cable Box on Cox, connected to my core via Firewire. Luckily, our local cable operator will give us all channels in clear except premium movie channels, which is very nice.
I am then able to record HD mpeg 2 streams in MythTV out of the cable box.

Since I do not have a large enough harddrive in my core, I mounted a NAS (a Buffalo Terrastation to be precise) at the location where LMCE saves MythTV recordings. Terrastation and Core are both using Gigabit Ethernet.

Now I noticed the other day while playing a HD recording, that the show started getting very very choppy at certain times. I also noticed that when this started happening, MythTV happened to start recording another show, also in HD.
This makes me think that it may not be practical to use a network share to record and play High Def television at the same time.

I was wondering if anyone else has tried this before? If there are any tricks I could try, such as changing network packet size or something, I would like to try that before investing in a larger harddrive for my core. I sort of prefer the idea of having everything on a large external storage space, so that I'm not limited by the size of the drive for my MythTV recording.

Thank you for any experiences that you may have to share.

Jean

[itspac]

are you able to record HD and play if the HD file was on the local harddrive without stutter? Just curious because I havent been able to max out my gigabit network.

[sandos]

Im sure its ok to use a network share, but the type of share matter. Some cheap NAS' are _REALLY_ slow. I tried some product which boasted gigabit interface, yet could never do more than 20MBit! 20Mbit would be much too low for HD.

[jeangot]

Sorry for the delay. Yes on the local drive in the core (core, not even MD) it plays fine.

My NAS is a Buffalo Terrastation, so I wouldn't consider it cheap. I thought that maybe it depended on the parameters used to mount it in linux, so I tried cifs, smbfs as well as cifs with the same options than those used by LMCE to mount shares automatically on the same NAS, but no success.

My problems occur on MPEG 2 video at roughly 6 Gb/hour. When I play back a H264 file at about 3 Gb/hour, I have no problems for example.

I'm about to give up and just install a bigger internal drive into the core...

Jean