Change default folders for TV recordings and timeshift on Ubuntu 22.04

Jef Bosk

Guys, I am stuck again....

The installer sets as default folder for tv recordings /var/lib/tvheadend/recordings which is actually not well thought, for people like me having 1 smaller partition for root and one separate for home. With the recordings folder on root, my 40 GB are full within few hours. I wanted to have both recordings and timeshift on home and created the following folders

/home/htpc/tvrecordings
/home/htpc/timeshift

entered in terminal the following commands

sudo chown -R hts:video /home/htpc/tvrecordings sudo chown -R hts:video /home/htpc/timeshift sudo service tvheadend stop sudo service tvheadend start

but Tvheadend keeps saying

dvr: the directory '/home/htpc/tvrecordings' is not accessible

Can anyone kindly help me? By the way, htpc is the name of the user I set when installing Ubuntu 22.04.

DeltaMikeCharlie

Did you go into the WebUI configuration screen?

Ensure that in 'General' your 'Default view level' is set to at least 'Advanced'.

Select 'Recording' and the 'Digital Video Recorder Profiles' and 'Timeshift' tabs and change the 'Storage path' settings there?

Jef Bosk

Yes, this is exactely what I did

DeltaMikeCharlie

Is your chown statement correct?

You said that your user name was 'htpc' but your have stated 'hts' in your chown.

Do you have TVH running as hts or htpc?

Jef Bosk

DeltaMikeCharlie it was an attempt to switch the owner of the folder from the user htpc to hts and see if it works. I installed TVH from the user htpc (the user hts is created by TVH's installation routine.

Flole

Does Tvheadend have access to /home/htpc aswell? It is not enough to give access to some subdirectory if the parent directory can not be read.

Jef Bosk

Flole what do you mean?...there is no user Tvheadend as far as I see. what should I do?

DeltaMikeCharlie

You could also check ps aux|grep tvheadend to see what command line arguments were used at startup.

Jef Bosk

DeltaMikeCharlie ps aux|grep tvheadend
hts 1001 0.1 0.2 834644 38148 ? Ssl 08:34 0:00 /usr/bin/tvheadend -f -p /run/tvheadend.pid -u hts -g video -6
htpc 4855 0.0 0.0 9608 2560 pts/0 S+ 08:46 0:00 grep --color=auto tvheadend

Sorry guys, I love Linux because it's usually running fast, smoothly and it is a safe system, but I keep on being "a beginner". Just keep on giving me simpler orders like this one...that will be great 😉

Flole

Jef Bosk The user that Tvheadend is running as (hts in your case) needs access to all directories above your recordings-directory. Not just to the recordings directory.

DeltaMikeCharlie

Can you please go to /home/htpc and do the following command?

ls -laF tvrecordings

Jef Bosk

DeltaMikeCharlie

ls -laF tvrecordings insgesamt 8 drwxr-xrwx 2 hts video 4096 Feb 2 17:46 ./ drwxr-x--- 22 htpc htpc 4096 Feb 10 09:27 ../

Jef Bosk

The crazy additional thing I discovered, TVH shows zero disk space, but in my home partition I still have 290 GB free

Jef Bosk

That was ist, I changed the permissions /home/htpc to 777 and now both recordings and timeshift seem to work fine.

sudo chmod 777 -c -R /home/htpc

Thanks a lot! 🙂

harrytomyzs

there is no user Tvheadend as far as I see. what should I do?