[mythtv] Multiple tuner conflict resolution bug or feature?

[Geoffrey Hausheer]

On Fri, 16 Jan 2004 08:49:22 -0800, "Mark Chou" said:
> I have a peculiar issue with conflict scheduling with 2 tuners (each on
> a different backend).  The output of "mythbackend --printsched" is
> attached below (with two cuts from brevity). Each of the shows last one
> hour; only a global pre/postroll of 60 seconds is specified; and each of
> the shows is a "channelrecord," i.e. record whenever it comes on this
> channel. Mythtv is from cvs dated 1/12.
> 
> I'm wondering why the first Nova program (below cut1) gets overridden,
> and does not get assigned to "tuner 2," when it's clearly available.
> Instead the "overridden" (as shown by the 'O' in column N.  Nova gets
> recorded at a later time, 1/18 (it just happens to be a repeat).
> 
This is by design.  the current idea is to avoid using the
conflict-resolution code whenever possible.  This means that if a
conflict can be avoided by recording a show at a later time, this is the
choice taken.

This behaviour should be quite easy to change, however, the default
should probably remain as is.  The best reason I can give for this is
that the user may want to watch live-tv during that time, and if all the
recorders are in use, he won't be able to.

My thought was to have a control that allowed the user to choose how many
tuners to leave free in this circumstance.  In the case where all tuners
in the system are needed, they would be, but if a program can be
deferred, this setting would come into play.  this would work well for
(a) multiple tuners in the same machine, where you run into disk-access
issues (recording two programs and playing back one all on the same drive
could lead to starvation issues on some machines), and (b) cases where
there are 3 tuners availiable, and the user wants to leave one (or two)
free for watching live-tv whenever possible.

As I said, the coding should be quite easy, but I really don't have time
to do it right now.

.Geoff