[mythtv-users] Multiple channels single tuner: a kludgey solution?

R. G. Newbury newbury at mandamus.org
Sun Dec 3 20:43:23 UTC 2006


Rev Simon Rumble wrote:
> This one time, at band camp, Ashley Bostock wrote:
>>    I thought the using multiple channels on a mux was the easy part.  Just
>>    integrating it all with the scheduler which is the hard part, something
>>    your solution doesn't really help with.
> 
> The using multiple channels is the easy part, but the problem with 
> integration is that the scheduler considers each tuner as capable of 
> only recording a single stream.  This solution makes every channel on 
> these muxes appear to be a separate "tuner".  
> 
To accept "multiple channels" is easy: the tuner already does that. It 
goes further by extracting the particular multiplex from the stream.
To make multi-channels work, we would have to have the software and 
quite possibly the hardware too, ignore the 'extraction' process so as 
to deliver the entire un-de-muxed stream to the frontend 
software/hardware combo.

I still think the easiest route will (on a structural bassis)be to 
record the entire stream and extract the desired multiplex on playback, 
but as noted, that may require changes at the hardware level... or some 
register bashing. I would be surprised if it is not already possible to 
tell the hardware to pass 'all' streams' as distinct to telling it to 
extract stream #X. (But the software is designed to tell it to extract a 
stream, and then passes that stream to the decoder).


I do not see the scheduler as a problem at all. The system 'knows' which 
programs are on at any time and 'knows' which multiplexes are related by 
reason of similar tuning characteristics except for the serviceid 
(stream id). So recordings at the same time are not conflicted in that 
case, as both/all will be recorded as part of the stream. What becomes 
more difficult is dealing with deletion from the video store, as you 
would not want to delete the file until all of the requested recordings 
have been watched and cleared for deletion.

Geoff


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