[mythtv-users] Tuners, conflicts and padding

[Thomas Mashos]

On Thu, Jan 1, 2015 at 1:25 PM, E James <e_james at dsl.pipex.com> wrote:
> 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.    _______________________________________________
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Padding could cause conflicts. For that few minutes that there is
overlapping, you're considered recording multiple channels (despite
the fact that they could be the same channel). Lets take a slightly
more simple scenario.

Lets say you have 1 physical tuner with 1 virtual tuner (for a total
of 1 tuner) and are going to record a show on channel 2 from 3:00 to
3:30 and a show on channel 2 from 3:30 to 4:00. Lets also say that you
set each show to start recording 1 minute early, and end recording 1
minute late. So the first show will want to start recording at 2:59
and end recording at 3:31 while the second show will want to start
recording at 3:29 and finish at 4:01. This creates a 2 minute overlap.
Even though both are on the same channel, mythtv will record those on
separate tuners. Since you only have a single tuner, this creates a
conflict. You can verify this is how it works by scheduling something
similar to this scenario and then reviewing which tuners it plans on
using (MythTV won't schedule both shows on the same tuner)

-- 
Thanks,

Thomas Mashos