[mythtv] [PATCH] Cancel a recording when no free recorder for live tv

[Kyle Rose]

> If you have more than one tuner, and all are being used for recording (or live 
> tv elsewhere), how does it pick which recording to automatically take you to?  

It arbitrarily chooses the first tuner today; it could choose the
first tuner's recording under this system.

> If all available tuners are being used for live-tv elsewhere, it can't even 
> do that.

Well, I'd argue that the right way to handle live TV is to treat it
exactly as recordings of single programs and simply keep track of
which programs are ephemeral and make sure to clean them up upon exit
from live TV or when the live TV buffer limit is exceeded.

Currently this would mean a slight perturbation at the start and end
of each program as the capture card is closed/reopened, but one could
imagine a recorder that does something more intelligent (e.g., cutting
between keyframes and not closing/reopening the capture card) when it
understands the underlying data format.

Personally, I think this would be ideal: not only would it be trivial
to convert a program from "live TV" status to "recorded," but it means
that live TV would not be treated differently from recordings except
in scheduling and deleting these ephemeral recordings and
automatically passing from one recording to the other when playing or
seeking.

It also makes it possible to deal intelligently with multiple front
ends using the same live TV capture card: either the first can be
designated master and other locked from changing the channel on that
card, or they can all fight for it.

Cheers,
Kyle