[mythtv-users] Live TV "change input" issue

[Stephen Worthington]

On Sat, 26 Jun 2021 22:19:37 +1000, you wrote:

>At times a recording fails to start as the tuner cannot get a lock, say on tuner1. I leave it in
>this state hoping it will get a lock later, but also decide to start a separate live tv recording.
>
>I start Watch-TV, select the channel I want to record, and myth picks the bad tuner1. Still no lock.
>
>I now use "change input" and pick another tuner. Myth does this but also changes the channel
>to whatever it remembers this tuner used last time. I enter the desired channel and myth then
>changes back to the bad channel - not what I wanted.
>
>If I kill the original stuck scheduled recording then myth will happily change to any channel
>without changing the source.
>
>How do I select an input (a tuner) and a channel even when the same channel it already tuned
>on another tuner?

There is usually no purpose in leaving a failing tuner running when it
has already failed to work in the first minute.  So the easiest thing
to do is to stop the existing recording and restart it.  You do that
from Manage recordings > Upcoming recordings.  I have never had a
tuner recover from a failure after it has flagged the recording as
failing and popped up a message about it.  Mythbackend does not do any
retries of failing tuners - it just waits for the tuner to respond. If
the tuner is failing, it will just keep on waiting for it to work
until the end of the recording time without ever doing anything to the
tuner to try to make it work.

If you want to start a new recording on a new tuner, then you can do
that by creating a new recording rule which specifies the input to
use.  But that is difficult to do when the start time for that
programme has already passed.  A manual recording rule with a suitable
start time a little in the future would work.  But you could try
creating a new recording rule from the programme in the guide, and
setting the "Start recording x minutes early" option to a negative
number so that the actual start time is a little in the future.

Are you aware that there are new events generated when a tuner is
failing and when it is decided that it has failed?  Those could be
used to automatically retry a recording, but there would be a fair bit
of work in getting it working correctly.  I am planning to have the
recording failing event send me a message via my Nextcloud server, so
if I am at home (with my phone and tablet connected to the Nextcloud
server) I will get the message almost immediately and will be able to
try manually fixing the problem, or at least be able to schedule a
recording from the +1 (one our later) channel if there is one for that
programme.