[mythtv] Merging cards and inputs, testing help needed

[David Engel]

On Mon, Jan 19, 2015 at 06:20:12PM -0500, George Nassas wrote:
> On Jan 18, 2015, at 9:16 PM, David Engel <david at istwok.net> wrote:
> 
> >> I don't see how to configure each input on a V4L card. My various IVTV devices have tuner, svideo and composite inputs but I don't know how to configure more than one at a time. I think I've done this in the past so something may have changed and left me disoriented.
> > 
> > This is slightly different from before.  When you configure the "input
> > connection" now for a card with multiple inputs, you choose the input
> > you want for this "MythTV card" from the combobox.  To use another
> > input on the same physical card, create another "MythTV card" and
> > choose the other input when you configure its input connection.
> 
> Makes sense. While I was configuring I saw a "device busy" message somewhere and it framed my thinking: I believe one of the digital tuners showed busy as I cycled through devices as it was already configured so I got the idea no capture card could be overloaded and never tried with an analog device.
> 
> I assume the presentation will change when the setup moves to html. There's no need for capture card and input connection entries in the menu but it's not worth the effort to trim the mythtv-setup program.

At some point, the "Capture Card" and "Input Connection" parts will be
combined into one.  I didn't do that because I wanted to keep the code
changes minimal for a couple of reasons.  One, I wanted to make sure
the the schema update didn't break anything.  Two, the settings
rewrite to use MythUI was recently been resurrected and didn't want to
impact it any more than necessary.

> Probably this has already been talked about but the term "capture card" should be retired too - partly because configuring multiple myth "capture cards" on one physical device is confusing and also because so many current devices aren't cards at all. Particularly IPTV and HLS recorders.

I personally hadn't really thought about it and was planning on just
keeping card.  I am open to suggestions, though.

> >> I ran out of time to do much testing with recording mostly because I'd have to rescan the on dvb device I deleted and recreated but the devices I didn't delete/recreate continued to work as before. I did schedule three subchannels on the 2250 which was recreated with 4 (virtual?) tuners and the scheduler did know to put then all on that one device. When it came to start recording it failed due the device's channels to not being scanned but the scheduling part seems fine.
> > 
> > Did you delete the videosource during your testing?  Simply deleting
> > and re-adding cards should require a rescan.
> 
> I recycled the existing videosource which is why I thought I could just reattach it and all would work but it didn't. No big deal.
> 
> > The big remaining thing
> > that would be nice if you could test it is recording off multiple
> > inputs on the same IVTV or 2250, and on the HD-PVR, but not at the
> > same time, of course.  The big concern I have with these recorder
> > types is avoiding overlapping access from different "MythTV cards".
> > As best as I can tell, these cards are opened only on demand, so
> > inputgroups should prevent simultaneious access.  I'd still like to
> > see it confirmed, though.
> 
> Restating so you know what I tested: I take it you want to see one of the HVR cards' analog side attached via multiple inputs (tuner, svideo, composite) and then verify that myth knows that they all back into one mpeg2 encoder making them exclusive. I deleted all my capture cards and added two for the HVR-1800's single analog side, one attached to the tuner and one to the S-Video input. Then I scheduled a bunch of shows at the same time to create a conflict plus another one after the conflict to see that things got back on track and it worked as expected. Only one recording was allowed to proceed and myth explained why. I uploaded the resulting capturecard, inputgroup, and record tables here: http://pastebin.com/R0mHiKDN

Did you actually record at least one program each input?  E.g. at
least one on the Television/Tuner input and at least one on the
S-Video input?  I was confident the scheduler would properly detect
any conflicts, but it's good to have that confirmed.  My main concern
is making sure the recording code completely shuts down everything on
one input before starting up again on another input.

David
-- 
David Engel
david at istwok.net