Moving my repository to the one suggested by Sundtek (my tuner), I found something similar. Before, there was a user /home/hts/ under which the recordings were stored. To me, that looked rather strange. I also fail to see a necessity to create a new user. So I saw the move to /var/lib/tvheadend/recordings as somewhat of an improvement. Though still not quite in line with the usual logic; under lib(rary).
Since I use an external drive for the recordings, later to be downloaded to my rendering machine, I had to mount that device to this directory:
/dev/sda1 /var/lib/tvheadend/recordings/ ntfs-3g uid=115,gid=121,dmask=022,fmask=133,rw,noauto 0 0
Though I fail to see the consistency with the common logic in *nix, this works.
Another glitch,so to day, it doesn't show under df, because it belongs to hts, and the x isn't set. Therefore, it doesn't show at all under df (except with sudo df). Therefore, a chmod 711 tvheadend/ in that directory was indicated.
While things improved with the move that you described, I still consider it a pity, that it was just half of the step to make it really fashionable, that is without requiring command line interaction.
While I understand that for a system deamon the setup doesn't look too bad, I think that for most users a non-deamonized start could be most helpful, and especially easier to debug. Like starting from the command line, in a crontab, whatnot. With a recording directory to be set easily somewhere under /home/foobar/.
The default install looks to be oriented pretty much into the direction of a server-based install, with multiple - if not banks - of tuners.
Overall, it remains an unfortunate state, I agree. The unprivileged single user can't see her files and directories, the owner hts has no accessible account. So the backup of earlier versions under /backup is not bad, and yet not necessarily useful for everyone.
The removal of completed recordings from the list had already been filed by me in the Sundtek forum. It defies logic, that a downloaded file, not deleted, vanishes from the list of downloads, only to appear under removed recordings, with 'file missing' after a complete restart.
