Sage Media content usage

[bnh]

I think i'm finally finished getting all of my pre-Sage content moved into Sage. Although I still have a fair amount of kids stuff, like Baby Einstein etc, that is prolly ready for garage sale and won't find its way into Sage.

I'm curious as to where i stand in the spectrum of current users, in terms of content available on your Sage server. I didn't count music/photos, but i don't have a lot of that anyway, and so far haven't found the family using Sage to get to that content very much.

The recent Olympics prolly accounted for a bunch of the Sage recorded content as that was recorded using QAM/HD. I really need to compress that stuff at some point...several 50GB files!

Recordings (both pre-Sage and Sage recorded): 958GB
Videos (mostly mpeg2 uncompressed; Home movies and DVD rips): 1,396GB / 274 titles

I'm kind of expecting i'm at the low end of the scale, but want to confirm that.

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by bnh

I'm kind of expecting i'm at the low end of the scale...

Couldn't prove it by me. I currently have about 200 GB of recorded TV, 60 GB of imported videos (mostly workout videos captured from VHS), 15 GB of music, and zero DVD rips. In fact I just the other day deleted a couple of hundred GB of recorded shows from last season that I never got around to watching and they weren't renewed so why bother?

There seem to be two basic types of SageTV users. On the one hand are the packrats who save lots of recordings, buy lots of DVDs and rip them, and spend kilobucks on multi-terabyte RAID systems to store it all. On the other side are folks like me who generally delete recorded shows after watching them, prefer to rent DVDs rather than buy them, and get by with less than a terabyte of video storage.

So perhaps you're at the low end of the packrat category, but that's not the only usage pattern.

[toricred]

I'm not sure how to compare. I have had as much as 200GB of recordings, but these were all compressed (I compress everything) to ~.75GB/Hour. Total titles was ~530 at that point. My imports are mostly DVDs and total about 75GB themselves and those aren't compressed. That will definitely be growing as the kids pick out more DVDs they "have to keep forever."

I'm a mixed bag as far as type. I personally record and delete after I watch, but my wife likes to record and keep things forever. The kids like to keep things for as long as I'll let them and keep rips of DVDs they really like (it seems like anything I'll let them watch).

[bnh]

yep, me and my wife, are definitely the packrat types. The investment of time and money motivates me to retain all those titles, particularly the kids stuff that i like to watch with them..while they're still young..Finding Nemo and the like. But i do wonder if i'll ever watch all of the Olympics over again, or if my wife will truly ever want to watch a particular 2004 episode of Oprah Winfrey (i won't!).

At least this Sage project has given me an elegant solution to aggregate all our content. My wife had around 500+ VHS tapes of various recordings that i cataloged and started capturing to digital format (pre-sage). I am now throwing those in dumpster. It feels like such a waste...partly because they prolly have never been watched more than once, and partly because it's an ecological no-no.

Maybe i have a weird philosophy. i decided against a RAID system, thinking i could afford to suffer a drive failure (after all, it's just videos), but i wasn't able to justify a JBOD arrangement and lose everything if a single drive failed. At the same time, there is something very satisfying about having every movie that i own, searchable and playable from one place and one interface. Add the recorded content to that and i have a packrat's paradise, at least until the hard drive space runs out.

I currently have 5 1TB drives, non-raid. Maybe i'll post about this again in a year's time and say how it's been silly to retain all the old unwatched content. My guess, though, is our packrat tendency will be given in to cheap hard drive storage. I wouldn't doubt seeing 2TB+ hard drives come out at current 1TB prices by then...if so, i'm sure i'll be upgrading drives and refreshing Sage's import libraries regularly.

[bnh]

Originally Posted by toricred

I'm not sure how to compare. I have had as much as 200GB of recordings, but these were all compressed (I compress everything) to ~.75GB/Hour. Total titles was ~530 at that point. My imports are mostly DVDs and total about 75GB themselves and those aren't compressed. That will definitely be growing as the kids pick out more DVDs they "have to keep forever."

I'm a mixed bag as far as type. I personally record and delete after I watch, but my wife likes to record and keep things forever. The kids like to keep things for as long as I'll let them and keep rips of DVDs they really like (it seems like anything I'll let them watch).

I'm curious what compression profile you use for your recordings?

[toricred]

I'm not using Sage's built-in compressions. I've used EP's wonderful Video Tools 3.0 to compress to h.264 in an mkv container for months with avi prior to that. I've recently started using DVR-MS Toolbox with HandBrake doing the compressions using the same command-line that EP's tools did for SD files. I'm still working on the right combination for HD files.