[mythtv-users] SiliconDust HD Homerun Quatro - multiple backends

[Stephen Worthington]

On Sat, 27 Oct 2018 15:13:10 +0000, you wrote:

>On Sat, Oct 27, 2018 at 2:23 PM glen <glenb at glenb.us> wrote:
>> .... also the smart apps would be able to pick up a tuner if myth is already using one, just not the other way around.
>
>Worse, the smart apps may pull a tuner out from under the
>use of MythTV.  Currently MythTV natively does not implement
>shared/pooled/locking of the available HDHR tuners (that was
>the purpose of the aforementioned external recorder).  Of
>course, the future is hard to predict (nor when it might
>arrive).
>
>The MythTV architecture, today, has a lot of presumptions
>about knowing what tuners are available to it exclusively.
>Not only do recordings (typically) fail if the tuner is
>unavailable (depending on exact specifications,
>sometimes it will be recording anyway), the presumptions
>go all the way down to scheduling (if it could know, 24
>hours in advance, that the dog was going to be watching
>Animal Planet on live TV in its dogPad in the crate it might
>schedule the (now) smaller number of available tuners at that
>time in a different way to not record some lower priority
>program (for the cat, obviously)).  Arguably if the project
>was able to provide native apps for the smart TVs, the
>iDevices, the ATV boxes, etc. then MythTV could again
>become the center of everything, but the resources do
>not seem to be available to implement and support that
>diverse ecosystem, so some (better) sharing is needed
>for those tuners to avoid the cats and dogs arguing over
>who gets to control the world.

I do wish everyone was not inventing their own protocols for network
tuners.  The SAT>IP protocol is standardised and works well for
sharing tuners.  It requires that if a tuner is already using a
frequency that a new connection wants to use, that the same tuner must
be used for that new connection.  And MythTV already has the RTSP part
of the SAT>IP protocol - it just needs to add the extra commands used
in SAT>IP and integrate the use of them with its scanning code so it
can scan for channels.  I use SAT>IP RTSP URLs with minisatip to share
my DVB-S2 tuners and it works well.  But I have to manually create the
channel entries for MythTV.

SiliconDust does not support SAT>IP - they have their own protocol.
But you can use TVHeadend to provide SAT>IP for HDHRs, and probably
other network tuners that have their own protocols.  I think that if
you set up all devices to use SAT>IP via TVHeadend, the sharing of the
tuners would work well.  But then you would need to have SAT>IP
capable apps on the Apple and Android devices, and those were a bit
lacking the last time I looked.  The SiliconDust apps probably work a
lot better than the SAT>IP capable apps I tried a year or so ago.