[mythtv-users] Can the scheduler be made to treat certain sources as blacklisted for certain times?

[Jack Perveiler]

On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 2:56 PM, Greg Oliver <oliver.greg at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 1:49 PM, Gary Buhrmaster <
> gary.buhrmaster at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 6:20 PM, Dan Wilga
>> <mythtv-users2 at dwilga-linux1.amherst.edu> wrote:
>> ....
>> > Dish Network receivers do pretty much the same thing. The only
>> difference is
>> > that you can configure when it happens. They say they do it in order to
>> > check for possible firmware updates.
>>
>> What I heard is not so much they are checking for firmware (although
>> they probably do that too), but that they are checking authorization.
>> If a receiver does not get regular validation of its authorization, it
>> eventually disables itself (requiring a drunken giraffe dance to reset).
>>
>
>
> The OP says he has to turn it back on though - that does not sound like a
> "cron reboot", but I do not know - DirecTV sent out an update 2 days ago
> that disabled the use of my DECA until I hard rebooted it..  At least their
> updates are infrequent and I miss a minimal amount of shows when they screw
> things up.
>
>
I (the OP) am on Charter with a Scientific Atlanta 8300 and the reboots are
"irregular".  Some weeks it might happen once a week, other weeks it might
be more frequently.  This week it happened 3 nights out of the last 4.  I'd
suspect a hardware problem or overheating except that it seems to always
happen around the same time (2:30 AM-ish).  For that reason I've always
assumed Charter was pushing something to the box nightly and causing the
reboot.  For what it's worth my last cable box (also a Scientific Atlanta
8300) did the same thing.

The reboot leaves the box in a very, very useful
on-but-only-shows-black-screen state.  If I hit a key on the remote a grey
"hit the power button to turn on" message is overlayed on top of the black
screen.  A genius design decision! Kill-a-watt shows the same power
consumption in both the "on" and "off" state of course.

My script uses the services API to ask the backend if my hdpvr is idle.  If
so it records 5 seconds of VBR video and checks the file size against a
threshold.  Recordings of static black screens are markedly smaller than
non-static images and this works pretty well.  If the size threshold isn't
met it sends the "power" command via irsend.  I dropped the script into
cron.hourly and now I get hourly "did Charter mess with me?"protection.

It sounds like a manual recording rule is the way to go for blocking out
the danger hour, thanks for all the comments.

--Jack
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