[mythtv-users] Trouble with recording groups

[Stephen Worthington]

On Fri, 8 Nov 2019 14:11:24 +0100, you wrote:

>On Fr, Nov 08, 2019 at 02:04:57 +0100, Jan Ceuleers wrote:
>>I take it that there are channels that are available on both DVB-S and
>
>Yes, indeed. The DVB-C channels are for the most part a subset of the 
>DVB-S channels.
>
>>DVB-C. You should assign the same xmltv IDs to those channels across the
>>two input sources, so that the same guide data is loaded for both
>>instances of that channel, and you should also assign them the same
>>channel numbers and callsigns, so that the scheduler sees them as one
>>and the same channel.
>
>Hm, that sound like you are using an external programme for the channel 
>data? As I said I’m using the EPG data from the tuner (EIT). Does this 
>work as well? If yes I would use the EPG data from DVB-S for the DVB-C 
>channels.

Where you have channels that are available from multiple sources, you
want the guide data to be identical on all the sources, as well as
callsigns.  That prevents the same episode of a programme from being
recorded from multiple channels due to the EPG data being different
and it appearing to be a different episode.

The channel numbers do not matter, as the scheduler ignores them.  It
can be useful for testing purposes to have different channel numbers
for the same channel on each source.  That allows you to easily test
each channel on each source using live TV by selecting each by their
channel numbers.

I have a setup like this.  For example, I can get the PRIME channel in
HD from DVB-S and in SD from DVB-T.  I have it on channel 10 for DVB-T
and channel 4004 for DVB-S.  The official channel numbers are 10 and
4, but channel 4 is used on DVB-T for a different channel, so what I
did is to use 4000 plus the official channel number for all my
DVB-S/DVB-S2 channels from my satellite service.  Both PRIME channels
have their callsigns set to PRIME and their xmltvid values are the
same, but their names are different: PRIME HD and PRIME:

MariaDB [mythconverg]> select
chanid,channum,sourceid,callsign,name,xmltvid,recpriority from channel
where name like '%prime%' and (sourceid=1 or sourceid=6);
+--------+---------+----------+----------+--------------+----------------------+-------------+
| chanid | channum | sourceid | callsign | name         | xmltvid              | recpriority |
+--------+---------+----------+----------+--------------+----------------------+-------------+
|   1010 | 10      |        1 | PRIME    | PRIME        | prime.freeviewnz.tv  |          10 |
|  10004 | 4004    |        6 | PRIME    | PRIME HD     | prime.freeviewnz.tv  |         150 |
|  10514 | 4514    |        6 | PRIME+1  | Prime PLUS 1 | primeplus1.sky.co.nz |           0 |
+--------+---------+----------+----------+--------------+----------------------+-------------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

There is also a PRIME+1 channel which is a DVB-S2 SD version of the
channel broadcast one hour later than the original channels.

So I can watch PRIME from DVB-T using channel number 10 in live TV, or
PRIME from DVB-S using channel number 4004.  Or I can watch the +1
channel using channel number 4514.

If I set up a recording rule to record a programme from PRIME, the
recording rule will have its 'station' field set to PRIME and the
scheduler will match that 'station' value against the 'callsign'
values in the channel table and it will then be able to record from
either chanid 1010 or chanid 10004, depending on which is available. I
have the priority set much higher on chanid 10004, so recordings will
be done from the HD DVB-S channel if at all possible - the scheduler
will normally prefer a later repeat on 10004 over an earlier recording
from 1010.

If I record a programme from PRIME based only on its programme title,
without specifying the channel, then it could also be recorded from
the +1 channel, which has a lower priority than the other two and
hence will only be used as a last resort.