[mythtv-users] minimize possibility input/capture card will be used for live TV

[Stephen Worthington]

On Mon, 13 Mar 2017 22:43:10 -0500 (CDT), you wrote:

>0.27 MythTV system installed under gentoo. 3 capture cards, all USB. 2 
>cards devoted to bringing in OTA, 1 hooked to the cable company DTA's "TV 
>out" coaxial jack for recording SD. The last-mentioned card sees the most 
>use since it is set to record a program each weekday.
>
>The problem with this set-up is that, whenever I go to watch live TV, the 
>system seems always to want to use the capture card hooked to the DTA--I 
>presume because that is usually the last input from which the system 
>recorded something. I don't want this behavior since that card has been 
>acting a bit flaky, and its flakiness seems to be exacerbated by live-TV 
>viewing. Rather I want the system, unless that input/capture card is the 
>only one not recording (a remote possibility), to not use it for live TV 
>viewing.
>
>Looking around today I found 
>https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Setup_Input_Connections, which seemed like it 
>might provide a solution. There it says, under "live TV order," "When 
>entering Live TV, the available, local input with the lowest, non-zero 
>value will be used." So I thought I would just need to assign the 
>input/capture card in question a higher value. But when I began 
>investigating, I discovered that it already had the highest value: its 
>value is set to 25, while the other OTA cards have values 18 and 14. So 
>the system should be, from what I'm gathering, using one of those 2 inputs 
>before it tries to use the one enumerated as 25. But that's not the 
>behavior I'm seeing. The system seems, instead of honoring that numbering, 
>to just want to tune live TV on whatever was the last-used input for 
>recording.
>
>So, am I misunderstanding something about how to minimize the possibility 
>that an input/capture card will be used for live TV? I see also at the 
>page I referenced that there is a way of preventing the input in question 
>from being used for live TV altogether: "Setting this value to zero will 
>make the input unavailable to live TV." I'd rather not go to that extreme, 
>though, since there is a likelihood that I'll forget having made this 
>configuration tweak and will wind up wasting a lot of time, should I ever 
>want at some later juncture, to view live TV through that input, figuring 
>out why I can't get that to work. Which is why I'm looking to minimize, 
>rather than exclude, the possibility.
>
>Input on this issue will be appreciated.

When you go into LiveTV from the "Watch TV" menu, it tunes to the last
channel LiveTV was tuned to.  If that channel was one that is only
available from the DTA, then it will use the tuner connected to the
DTA.  If you then change to a channel that is only available via the
OTA tuners, it will switch automatically to the one of them that is
set to the lowest Live TV Order value and is not already in use.
However, if you change to a channel that is available on both the OTA
tuners and the DTA, I am not sure what the behaviour is - it may
switch to the OTA tuners, but it may stay on the DTA tuner.  If in
that situation you wanted to make sure it switched to an OTA tuner,
you would need to ensure that all channels that are available on both
the OTA and DTA tuners had lower channel priorities on the DTA tuner.
Or you could give the DTA tuner a lower priority than the OTA tuners,
so that the OTA tuners will always be tried first.

If you want to start watching on an OTA channel, and LiveTV was last
on a DTA channel, you can do that by going to the Guide and using M
(menu) from the channel you want and selecting "Watch This Channel".