2Qs: TV Support & What filesystem for shared Media Partition

[Angryguy]

I just bought a spare 120GB HD on the bf sales, which I plan on using primarily for storing my media files.

Currently, I've been doing all of my media stuff under windows (really just a lot of experimentation), however I want to try and experiment with the linux media programs (DVD-authoring/burning/video-editing) as well. The problem is, I have no idea how to share the media files between linux and windows - most likely I will be working with at least some of those files in both OS, and that's often after transferring it to my AMD-64 system over the network after capturing it from a TV-tuner card on my other system.

I have a smaller FAT32 partition for sharing smaller files between Windows and Linux, however that obviously won't work when dealing with large media files that exceed the max FAT32 file size.


Q1: Does anyone else here routinely share large files between OS? And if so, what file system do you use? (Transferring multi-gig files back and forth on the network can't be the best solution, even with multiple multi-boot systems) Ideally, if there were a single file system, that supports large files, and that both Linux and Windows can read&write to, there wouldn't be a problem, but as far as I know, no such thing exists yet.


[off-topic:] I'm still trying to decide where I'm going to install that drive as well. I can either take the easy approach and install it on the AMD64 computer and use the entire drive for media/data storage, although I think most of that space would go to waste. Alternatively, I'm thinking of Ghosting my other systems 40GB XP drive onto a partition on the new one, and swap the drives - giving me an extra 40 GB drive for media on my AMD64 system (size I originally wanted), and leaving me an extra 80 GB to partition on my old system for adding Linux (if I can get the TV-tuner & remote fully working under it) and storing captured media files. Captured media files meaning both higher-quality MPEG-2 captures for transferring to DVD, and MPEG-4 video for the PVR features. Anyway, I'll prolly be thinking about this for a while until I have the time to do anything more then testing that the drive works . . .

Q2: If I take the latter approach, will Gentoo support all of the TV-features on the old system (specs in sig.), including the ATI Remote? I use that system primarily as a TV, so if the Tuner and remote don't work, I'm not going to be able to get a lot of usage out of a linux installation on there. If I can though, then I'll also try to configure it as a file server of some sort (I've got 2 desktops and a laptop, and get's getting chaotic keeping track of where my various files/settings are stored).


Thanks.
_________________
Main System:
AMD Athlon 64 3000+
MSI K8T-NEO FSR, 512MB DDR333
120GB WD HD
MSI Geforce 6600GT Vid-Card
Gentoo, WinXp, Winx64

Dell system:
ATI Radeon AIW 9000Pro Vid-Card
40 GB + 20 GB HDs
Pentium 3 933 mHz, 384 MB RAM
Win XP, WinMe

[fangorn]

there are free windows drivers for ext2. Havent tried them (no windows here since win2k service pack 3, doing many video work), but they are said to work.