[mythtv-users] Bolstering a system for Watch TV

Michael T. Dean mtdean at thirdcontact.com
Tue Nov 12 13:30:20 UTC 2013


On 11/11/2013 01:45 PM, Stefan Jones wrote:
> To reduce my monthly cable TV bill, I'm thinking of turning in my STB 
> and DTC, and just using a HDHR Prime/Cablecard.
>
> This would mean using MythTV's Watch TV function if I ever want to 
> watch a live show.
>
> I have used Watch TV many times as a test tool, to check on reception 
> and channel identities and so on. But it has always seemed a little 
> flaky to me.
>
> Besides increasing the size of the ring buffer (?), are there other 
> things I could do to make my system better able to handle the task?
>
> I may also make a couple of simple front ends to stick on my guest 
> room and office TVs.

I think any "Live-TV-specific" flakiness you may have noticed is 
actually just due to the (hasn't-gotten-much-TLC) Live TV implementation 
in MythTV.  Basically, as MythTV (and its use of the huge variety of 
supported capture devices for capturing TV with a huge variation in 
tuning/timing/...) has changed over the years since the current Live TV 
implementation was put in place, much about the Live TV implementation 
seems to be in need of updating.

So I don't think there's anything you (or anyone else) can do to your 
system to make it more stable with respect to Live TV usage.  The only 
solution to Live TV flakiness is for someone who cares about Live TV to 
actually "pay the fees" (i.e. put in the work to find bugs/issues in the 
Live TV code and patch them).

The alternative that's available to anyone (regardless of the amount of 
time they have to spend on MythTV), though, is to just not use Live TV.  
There's really no need for Live TV if using a DVR as a DVR, where you 
record anything you might possibly ever watch.  Even for "time-specific" 
content, like news or sports, Live TV isn't necessary and has many 
disadvantages over non-Live-TV recordings ( 
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/387302#387302 ).  
(Even in the

Mike


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