Multiple BTV Servers on the same network

[MHTomkins]

I have two computers on my network that have BTV3.5 and 3 that have BTV link but I am trying to link the two servers so that they can access the recording on each without using web admin. I had the Idea of creating a folder that accesses the folder on the other server but it hasn't worked for me. If you have any solutions to my problem it would be much appriciated.

[flavius]

BTV is not ready for clustering. You'll be far better off by assigning specific recording jobs to each server, like "this one has all the cartoons and other kidshows", that one is for the grown ups.

BTV lacks specifically robust code when it comes to folders located on network drives, it's very unforgiving, let alone sharing of resources between servers.

[Fonze]

I haven't tried this but it sounds like it would work. You could share the video folders on each machine. they would have to have read and write access, unless you don't want recordings getting deleted from the other BTV. In order to get this to work, I think you would have to map a network drive to the respective shared folder and then add that to the video folders using the web admin.

[nanook105]

Originally Posted by MHTomkins

I have two computers on my network that have BTV3.5 and 3 that have BTV link but I am trying to link the two servers so that they can access the recording on each without using web admin. I had the Idea of creating a folder that accesses the folder on the other server but it hasn't worked for me. If you have any solutions to my problem it would be much appriciated.

I have a simular setup (2 BTV servers and 4 BTV Links) and it works well. PVR1 has four tuners and is primarly responsible for recording regular TV. PVR2 is primarly responsible for recording movies. I do all of my recording locally on each, and also share folders on each so that the content is the same (for the content I want shared). What are you trying to accomplish ?

[Josch]

You just have to map a network drive in Windows (right click on My Computer, click 'map network drive'- then find the shared resource from the other server, and point it to the desired drive letter in the wizard, and click 'finish'). I set my Media drive on the other server to be drive Z: Then go into webadmin localhost:8129 and set up your video folders to see into your network drive folders on the other computer (Z:/TV Programs -for example). Then you can set the other computer to see whatever folders in this computer by doing the same procedure on that computer. I did this with my laptop, and it works just fine on my 100 Mbit/s (full-duplex) home LAN. I don't have a tuner card in my laptop though, so I only mapped a drive one way to the home server, and not the other way around, but if both of your servers have tuner cards, then you'd just configure both computers with mapped network drives, and then both servers should be able to see the recorded shows in the other computers that they map to.

If it were me, I would probably set each server to record only on a local drive just to minimize network traffic (so you aren't recording over the network through your mapped drives), then you can just watch playback over your LAN through the video folders that are mapped across the network. I don't know, you could experiment with it though (recording) and see if it works. But in my opinion, if the network gets clogged, your recordings could get jittery which would effect you every time you played back files, whereas if you are just playing back files over the network and network gets clogged, then it would only jitter on the playback so your recording would still be perfect, and that file could be burned to DVD without having jitters in it. It all depends on how fast your home LAN is, and much traffic it gets now. If you had gigabit LAN you might not have these issues at all and maybe you could record across the LAN without worrying about jitters. You would have to determine what your LAN is capable of and configure it accordingly to what it can handle trafficwise. I know my LAN never jitters on playback, but if I were to be recording one-way to one server, and playing back another way simultaneously to the other computer, then I wouldn't be sure if I could guarantee that I have enough bandwidth to perform that without stuttering. A stutter here or there wouldn't bug me so much in playback, but I wouldn't want a recording to have stutters in it, since I always burn a lot of content to DVD and I like my DVDs to be the best quality that they can.