[mythtv-users] HD Homerun virtual tuners and cableco QAM channel remapping

[lists.md301]

On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 11:24 AM, lists.md301 <lists.md301 at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 10:41 AM, Michael T. Dean <mtdean at thirdcontact.com>wrote:
>
>> On 04/03/2012 09:36 AM, lists.md301 wrote:
>>
>>> I'm not sure this is a bug, per se, because this is a very special
>>> corner case.  But I wanted to put it out there and ask if anyone else has
>>> seen it, and if there are any steps I could take after a mapping change
>>> deal with this situation.  I think the Perl script is a great thing, and I
>>> know the author suggests that running it a 3am and letting it do an update
>>> potentially keep you from losing recordings.  I'm thinking that if a user
>>> has virtual tuners defined, it may have other issues.  Thoughts?  As I have
>>> to finish my taxes (for myself and my mother) this week, intersecting with
>>> myth not-recording time, I'm not sure how much time I'll have to experiment
>>> with this in the coming week to get a handle on what's going on.
>>>
>>
>> The short answer is had you used a supported approach for updating your
>> channel (and related) information and restarted the master backend, all
>> would have worked.  This is exactly why we don't support direct DB editing
>> of the data.
>>
>> Our intention for the future is to make the supported approach even
>> easier and more reliable (and, perhaps, even semi-automatic, eventually) so
>> there's absolutely no reason for users to feel they need to do it manually.
>>  <http://www.mythtv.org/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users>
>
>
> Thanks for the reply, Mike. I understand the risks of using an unsupported
> method. I brought this to the list because I suspect I'm not the only one
> doing it.  I don't expect the developers to support me (or anyone) in doing
> things against design.  However, I suspect that for at least some of us who
> are doing unsupported things, it's because we are long-time users (for me,
> since 0.13) who resorted to doing these things because on older versions,
> it was the only way to do them when certain functionality was new, or do
> them reliably.   (I remember mucking with a channels.conf file and the DVB
> scan utilities when I first got an AverMedia A150 digital QAM card.) [snip]
>

Following up on my previous, because it might of interest to some.  It
turns out (as is often the case with these things), that something got
messed up with my mythtv-setup input groups for the virtual tuners, and
that is probably the root cause of my issue.  I discovered this (by
accident) by further doing that illicit thing of looking (but not touching)
the database.  I noticed a single input group, but it only included 2 of
the 3 tuners for one physical HDHR clear QAM tuner, and nothing at all for
the other physical tuner.  After a bit more investigation, I basically
re-assigned the each tuner's input connections, and saw the input groups
for each were automatically created.  I was unaware of this, and have since
looked through the documentation and did not find any mention of this as it
relates to virtual tuners.  In hindsight it makes perfect sense, but I
didn't know (1) it was how mythtv managed this, and (2) it got handled
automatically.  I was aware of manually creating input groups to manage a
single recorder source.  My virtual tuners have behaved properly once I
corrected the input group assignments

Bottom line is, I'm not sure how this got messed up in the first place for
my HDHR QAM virtual tuners (I'm sure it was operator error, and not any
software bug), when I deleted all and re-created my tuners to add the new
HDHR Prime ones in my initial 0.24 setup.  Perhaps it would be a good idea
to make mention of input groups with virtual tuners in the documentation,
but I'm unsure myself where the best place for this would be (or I would do
it myself).  Or if it is already, and I've missed it, feel free to ignore
this suggestion.
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