I {love} my media center. It changed how I watched TV, I don’t watch live TV anymore. Ever. It is amazing how it gets the shows I want and how I can zip through the commercials and pretty much just watch TV the way I want. Sure I have some complaints like it encodes files horribly (in comparison to friends who have Tivo’s the format MSFT uses seems to be a fat pig) and it doesn’t do things like allow me to say record all BattleStar Galactica’s that aired after 2000 so I don’t get the 70’s Battle Star Galactica marathon’s records or email me if it has new conflicts it needs time to resolve and there other small things that I have complained about in the past. However, as a whole, I really really like it and would be quite unhappy without it if I didn’t also get rid of my television. I was supposed to check out Myth TV but I just haven’t found the time yet.
So why am I complaining this evening? The darn thing started recording a Will and Grace yesterday (Friday actually, I started writing this at about 11:56PM Saturday) and I happened to look at what was recorded just a bit ago and saw that half my shows I haven’t watched had started getting erased… I dig further into it and it is STILL recording the same Will and Grace… That obviously isn’t right. I had no clue this was going on so the Media Center was happily wiping my other files (aka shows)Â as the Will and Grace just ate up more and more space. It was several hundred gigabytes in size when I killed it. Several HUNDRED GBs!!! Thankfully the daily recording disk array is only about 300GB (yeah my friends with Tivo’s are like, crap I could record everything from now until eternity and fit it on that disk….) which is usually more than enough for anything I do in a week but I tend to move files I want to make sure nothing happens to over to another 500GB or so disk array that media center is not allowed to touch. Had I not done that and had I not checked the media center (I can go a day or three without it occasionally) then I would have lost all shows that had recorded recently. That is damned annoying.
So what does this mean? It means I have to set up disk space monitoring for my Media Center. It means a monitor that will be emailing me and possibly even texting my phone if the disk gets below 100GB of free space. WTF! There is something wrong when you are worried about 300GB of disk space being used up by a device that should maybe be using 10-20GB in a night.
Anyway, back to working on ADMOD.
    joeÂ
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