[mythtv-users] Can you bind recordings to a particular card?

[Bruce Markey]

I feel your pain ;-)...

Phil Bridges wrote:
> Currently, I have a 2-tuner system: 1 250 and 1 M179.  The M179 has poor
> picture quality (fuzziness and vertical lines) on a couple of channels;

If your M179 is in a slot next to a PCI soundcard, try rearranging
slots so that no tuner is next to a soundcard.

Grab a monkey wrench and give each of the coax connectors in
your home (not just the one where you see a poor signal) an
extra quarter turn. This does more good than any software could
ever do.

> normally, this wouldn't bother me, but one of those channels is CBS, and I
> like CSI.

Just CSI? Easy. Go to the recording options page, select
Scheduling Options and raise the priority higher than you've
given any other show. CSI will always record on card 1.

However, you probably also want any show on CBS to normally
win card 1 so go to TV Setting->Recording Priorities->Channel
Priorities and raise the priority for CBS. This means that
any showing on CBS will have an advantage and will win card
1 unless you've lowered a CBS show priority and/or raised a
conflicting show's priority by enough to overcome the channel
priority.

You could also run the backend setup program to go to the Input
Connection page for the 250 and set the "Input preference" to 1.
This says that it is 1 better to record a show on the 250 than
the 179. If a show has a priority value of 3, the total would be
4 for card 1 and 3 for card 2. The result is that if an episode
has multiple showings and it would have been scheduled for card
2 but there is a later showing that will fit on card 1, it will
record the later showing when it can record on card 1. If there
was just the one showing, it would still record on card 2. Note
that you would have this behavior for every channel and not just
the ones with poor quality on card 2.

See section 11.6 of the howto from current CVS for way too much
detail. file:///your_src_dir/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-11.html#ss11.6

> Anyway, is it possible to set recordings to only record on a particular
> tuner?  Is it possible to have a tuner not even display spefici channels,
> but let the other tuner show them?

This is a good question to begin with but there is a better question
about the end result. If you have two shows at the same time and
both are on channels with poor quality, would you rather record
both knowing that one will have poor quality or would you rather
blow off the second show and never see it? For me, I'd have to
know that the picture would be pretty much snow with no audio
before I'd prefer the latter. If it turned out to be nearly
unwatchable I could delete and allow re-record and hope it is
shown again but at least I'd have had a chance to watch it. This
holds true if the two shows are one that I don't care about and
one I really don't care about or if they are one that I like and
one that I really like.

I also have a slightly different signal quality from outlets in
different rooms. My card 1 is where I get the best signal. Most
channels are good but for a hand full I can see that they are
not as good on card 2. I use Channel Priorities and it does the
right thing 99% of the time and I may make manual changes if I
need to for unexpected situations.

For example, FOX has a slight difference so I give it a slight
channel boost but OLN is very noticeable so I give it more. Shows
on FOX normally record on card 1 as expected. I never watch OLN
except for the Tour de France. If a FOX show needed to record
during the Tour de France, Lance would win (as expected =) and
the FOX show wouldn't be quite as clean as it might have been but
I still get to watch it.

--  bjm