[mythtv-users] Phantom encoders appearing randomly

[Stephen Worthington]

On Fri, 2 Dec 2022 08:21:18 +0000, you wrote:

>I may be misunderstanding here but I thought the global start early setting
>was for tuners that were slow to tune and start recording, or to allow a
>'sleeping' backend to wake up.
>
>It's the 'start early' / 'end late' settings in the recording rule that
>allow for the overlapping recordings and which may get ignored.  Of course
>if the settings are in the default recording rule template then they're
>sort of global.

You have that back to front.  The "Start early" and "End late"
settings in recording rules are never ignored.  The global settings
(RecordPreRoll and RecordOvertime in the settings table - I forget
where they are in the menus) are normally set to 60 seconds and will
be ignored on back-to-back recordings.  They exist primarily to allow
for slow tuners or secondary backends that need to be started.  For a
back-to-back recording situation, the same tuner is used and it is
already running, so any tuner or secondary backend does not need to be
started.  If a hard disk needs to be spun up for the second recording
of the pair, then there will likely be some recording missing at the
start while that happens - mythbackend does not expect drives to be
spun down.