Posts by LybsterKodi

    the "what will I lose?" question

    So far I've never lost anything - its just the inconvenience of disconnecting the HDD and hooking it up to a Windows PC for a repair. If I had the money (I don't) I'd be happy to have the house rewired and buy new kit & a NAS to run gigabit .

    As an example: I've invested thousands of man-hours ripping and recording a large private CD and Vinyl collection

    The proverb is "There are two types of IT user: those who take their backups seriously, and those who didn't lose all their data yet"

    In my case its probably hundreds of hours - still a lot to repeat. I'd class myself as the first type of user but I operate with a restricted budget so only one backup.

    I'm asking because we had a few lights off/lights on sessions today. My Dell Optiplex & 6TB USB HDD were on but just sitting there quietly not playing anything or recording anything and the 6TB NTFS HDD needed repairing.

    I could revert to ExFAT and modify my sysncing software to handle the timestamp differences between Linux and Windows or I could (I think) set up a PC to dual boot to Linux so I can reformat the 6TB HDD and copy all the files from backup (around 10 - 12 hours).

    EXT4 is often recommended here but what I don't know is how resilient is it. Will LE/KODI/EXT4 handle a power outage or is a repair going to be needed or what?

    Environment: Dell Optiplex i5-6500, LibreELEC-Generic.x86_64-12.0-nightly-20230923-86f2494.img,Hauppauge WinTV-dual HD - Dual tuner, TVHeadend 4.3, Rumster Forest mast

    One of my newsfeeds mentioned a program I'd like to record. Its on BBC 3. I have BBC 3 on my Panasonic TV, and I can find it using SichboPVR on a Windows PC but I can't find it on Kodi/TVHeadend. I do have the 522MHz (which is where the BBC channels are) mux set up but no sign of it. I also have a number of timers set up so don't want to wipe everything and start again. Any suggestions / help?

    Is there any chance to get LE installed to a partition?

    I also asked the question and the answer is no.

    LybsterKodi
    September 23, 2023 at 2:40 PM

    The last point made by VLouis is the critical one. If you want to be able to access the HDD using both LibreElec and Windows then, unless you have a high speed network, you really have to stick with NTFS or ExFAT., otherwise, if you use EXT4 all Windows access will have to be via SAMBA or something like FileZilla.

    A lot will depend on how you load stuff onto the HDD. In my case I'm back to using NTFS after a time using ExFAT. I started with NTFS and moved to ExFAT because of the corruption issues (not real corruption ie I never lost anything but LE/Kodi wouldn't boot with the HDD attached). I moved back to NTFS because with one of the upgrades and the move to RPi4 the way file timestamps were calculated on LE and Windows differed which messed up my backup system.

    I'm not concerned about the time to move a ripped DVD over to Kodi over my slow network I just wander off and let it get on with it while I do something else, even if it takes an hour. However, when I moved from NTFS to ExFAT I connected both live and backup HDDs to USB3 ports on my PC and it still took 10+hours to copy the c3.5TB of data. If I'd tried to do that over my slow powerline LAN it would have been in the DAYS.

    With that out of the way I'd like to say that using ExFAT did give me a lot less problem on LE/Kodi. There was only one big issue. If I tried to boot my Windows PC with a 6TB ExFAT formatted HDD - it just wouldn't. Whenever I forgot it (my backup HDD) was plugged in I had to turn the PC off, unplug and restart. Not a problem with NTFS.

    I've finally got round to setting up some new playlists on my Dell based Kodi and I decided to remove some of the categories that I don't want. It seems that the only way to make the changes stick is to reboot Kodi. Is that right or am I being somewhat thick/unobservant by missing a great big SAVE CHANGES button?

    With the RPi3 all I had a mini wifi keyboard and the TV remote. The RPI3 was left turned on. if the RPi was powered up all I did was press any button on the keyboard and the TV would power up and switch to the right HDMI port. I used the TV remote to switch back to the TV. If powered off then powering up the RPi would turn on the TV and switch to the right HDMI port.

    It was the same with the RPi4 I used for a short while - I'm now using a Dell Optiplex.

    If you're using some script to manage things if you post it here I'll give it a go on the RPi3 or 4