[mythtv-users] Live TV recoding behavior?

[Chris Palmer]

Mike Benoit wrote
> The ring buffer doesn't seem to get used until I press the pause or
> rewind buttons. So if I'm watching a hockey game or something, and I
> want to rewind to watch a play again, I can't unless I had the foresight
> to previously pause the game for several minutes and watch it slightly
> "behind". In theory shouldn't the ring buffer be constantly full, always
> recording live TV, so I can rewind at any time? Or is there a setting
> somewhere that enables this functionality that I've over looked?

the buffer does start when you begin watching a show, but it just won't 
show it as being "full" until you start going backwards in time.  my 
experience has shown that I can "rewind" to get to previously buffered 
program.  maybe the OSD (and I haven't seen the recent OSD enhancements,
yet, so maybe they're doing this already) should show how many mins:secs
of program is available in the buffer *before* your current position,
in addition to what it shows now.

> It would also be nice if the ring buffer wasn't reset when the channel
> was changed. Perhaps separate ring buffers per channel, so if your
> channel surfing during an ad, you can go back and still rewind? Or
> simply record all channels to the one ring buffer, so rewinding will
> show channel changes as well? Has anyone else requested such a feature?

agreed.  it shouldn't have to wipe it out if you don't want it to.  
I like both recommendations that I saw as responses, but both would
not be necessary, unless there was enough support for both and then
let the user choose the behavior in setup:

1. simply don't reset the buffer when changing channels (hopefully easy), 
   or have multiple ring buffers (probably tricky, but very cool idea).
   especially cool if you have multiple tuners and you already have
   a buffer going for a channel that you change to, where you would just
   view the program in the other buffer without stopping the buffering 
   for the tuner you just left.
2. if you're behind the "current" time and trigger any feature that
   would result in losing more than N seconds of buffer, then prompt
   with an "are you sure? you'll lose MM:SS of buffer..." warning. 

Some neat ideas there that would give MythTV more advantages over 
commercial DVR's.  :)

-Chris