[mythtv-users] Finding gaps in the MythTV recording schedule to do maintenance in

[Simon Hobson]

Stephen Worthington <stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz> wrote:

> I have a busy MythTV box, so when I need a few hours to do some
> maintenance on it, such as changing tuner cards or rearranging the
> drives, it can be a problem to work out when enough time will be
> available.  So I wrote myself a Python script called "gaps" that uses
> the new API to get the recording schedule and find when there are gaps
> in it.
...
> Please let me know if you find any problems with it.

Apart from me having an ancient version of MythTV :-(


In the past I've looked at things slightly differently - as in decide when I'd like to do maintenance and then work out whether I can do it. Seeing existing gaps would probably help - but it's more normal to think "I've got a couple of hours today, can I do ..."

I never actually got as far as doing it, but I was thinking of adding dummy muxes & channels so that I could create a manual recording per tuner card and thus force the scheduler to look for alternative showings of anything scheduled during my planned maintenance window. With the way muxes are, and multi-rec, it's really hard (impossible ?) to force this without some dummy channels. I could then look at upcoming recordings - if there's no conflicts then I'm OK, if there are conflicts then there's something the scheduler can't work around and I need to decide whether to amend my plans or accept missing the recording.
Given how many of the things I record have multiple showings, just looking at what's scheduled now isn't usually that good an indication of whether the system can be safely taken down - at least without quite a bit of interpretation and knowledge of which programs could be recorded at a different time.