[mythtv-users] Tuners, conflicts and padding

[E James]

I would really appreciate some guidance in managing tuners, padding and conflicts. At present, I have only Freeview digital reception and only 2 multiplexes to work with. I have several digital recording options but the main ones are DVBLink and MythTV. DVBLink has the use of 2 HDHomerun units (4 physical tuners) and MythTV has a third HDHomerun (2 physical tuners. DVBLink operates on a strict one channel, one tuner basis, so the maximum number of channels it can record simultaneously is 4. Please note that this means writing 4 digital streams simultaneously to the same hard disc, which it apparently manages without difficulty. MythTV, like Media Portal (which I have also tried), has the ability to separate individual channels from the multiplex, so MythTV can apparently record more than one channel simultaneously from a single multiplex. So MythTV operates on the principle of one channel per virtual tuner. I have 2 physical tuners and I have assigned 4 virtual tuners to each which m
eans I can record 8 channels simultaneously so long as it's 4 per physical tuner. Tonight I wanted to record 3 channels from one multiplex and one from the other, so why am I getting conflict messages? What does "Conflict Today" mean? What does "Conflicting" mean? Why didn't the conflicts show up when I originally defined the recordings? With 2 "back to back" programmes on the same channel, does padding cause a conflict?

I'm running MythTV 0.27 with Lubuntu 13.10 on a shuttle DS47.

Happy New Year.