Tuesday 31 July 2012

Day 7 - Can Team GB finally win a gold?

digiguide.tv is missing channel 24 yet again (I've posted on their forums to notify them of the problem - almost all their listings to 10th Aug have nothing on channel 24!), so my initial figures of 23 channels, 23 sports, 56 slots and 212 hours and 38 mins of recordings may need revising if the Now/Next data pops up a sport on channel 24 later today. Yes, I'll be splitting the usual suspects (tennis, sailing, equestrian), so I won't bother mentioning the splits in the future unless a new sport is involved that I haven't split before.

You may have noticed that I'm using day numbering three ahead of what the BBC are saying. The reason for this is that Olympics events did not start on Saturday (that's the first full day of events admittedly), but actually three days earlier. Yes, there were "only" 6 women's football matches, 8 men's football matches and a scandalously unaired archery competition on those three days, but they were all part of the Olympics and should be counted as taking place on an Olympics day.

So we now reach the end of a week's events and Team GB are desperate for a gold medal. Just don't ask me where the first one will come from, but if they don't get one today, I think I'd call the first week a failure. A 15-year-old girl won a gold medal in swimming for Lithuania yesterday and even they're beating us in the medal table now.

Watching bits of the artistic gymnastics yesterday - well done for the bronze medal, lads! - it did confrm what I was thinking before the Olympics was needed to cover the event: multiple channels surely? There were clearly multiple apparatus in use by competitors simultaneously, so we actually missed quite a bit of live action (some of it was shown recorded, but I suspect we didn't get all of it even then). Athletics will be in a similar position of course.

Just finished watching an epicly long tennis match between Tsonga and Raonic on BBC Olympics 7 HD today. A real shame the terrestrial BBC channels didn't pick up on it - no British player in it I guess. It ended 6-3 3-6 25-23 to Tsonga! That's 66 games and something like 3 hours and 57 minutes. I believe the number of games is a record for an Olympics tennis match, though the points were almost all short and there were no tiebreaks, so I'm not sure that the total time sets a record. No commentary on most of the match and I actually quite liked that - plus the umpire was announcing things with quite a sarky voice :-) At 21-21, a Scottish commentator finally turned up and then Tracy Austin joined in at 22-21.

In case you're wondering what happens when the first of my eight 3TB HDD's gets close to full, I'll explain the setup to you. My transmedia program will only copy to an HDD with at least 1% free (something like 29-30GB) and also with enough actual free filestore space to copy the file into. The disks to be checked are listed on the command line (e.g. /mnt/disk1 /mnt/disk2 /mnt/disk3) and each one is tried in the order specified. If none have the space, the file remains on SSD.

So what happens when all the 3TB drives are almost full? I have 2 in one PC and 3 in another, so when a full day would fill the final disk, I simply swap out any one of the nearly-full 3TB disks for a fresh empty one before the first recordings of the day start. I have three 3TB in a drawer and another two 2TB as emergency spares. I would also remount the "full" disks read only to avoid anything being written to them. Clearly, there must be at least two 3TB disks in each PC at all times for all of this to work. Note that I use /dev/sd* syntax in /etc/fstab and not the UUID (which would change each time a disk was replaced).

I picked up one trick in the last few days with my setup - after the final slot to start is allocated to a tuner in the evening (it's currently boxing at around 20:25 or so), then I double up as much recording as I can on both PCs. The reason I don't do it earlier is that it's possible to over-allocate double-ups and lock out recording later slots. Those later slots could need a 5th transponder that's not available because 4 tuners are using the first 4 transponders already. There's no SSD space issues because there are far less evening slots than afternoon ones, at least in this first week.

Well, the answer to this particular posting title was a sad "no". A week of events, something like 55 golds awarded and we're now probably at the lowest position (21st) in the medal table that we'll be in for the entire Olympics. The BBC Website (I'll eventually find the link again!) showed each day's progress in 2008 compared to 2012 and we are already behind that (we won a gold on full day 2 in 2008).

 Day 7 recording size: 1011GB - grand total so far: 5088GB (5.0TB)

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