[mythtv-users] multiple tuner question

[Ray Olszewski]

At 10:23 AM 6/18/2003 -0400, John Goulah wrote:
>Hey,
>
>  Finally got mythtv working great and I just had a quick question about
>multiple tuners. Right now I only have one tuner and when I am recording it
>won't let me watch live tv because "all inputs are in use". Will adding a
>second tuner allow me to watch tv while recording?

Yes, in principle (but see below).

>Furthermore, if I am
>recording 2 shows simutaneously (assuming I have 2 tuners), I'm assuming I
>would get the same error when watching live TV? Then 3 tuners would fix that?

Yes, in principle (but see below).

>
>And can you use one soundcard for all of them? or do you need a sound card
>for each tuner?

You need a sound *source* for each tuner. If you are using capture cards 
that work with btaudio, you don't need any soundcard-based sound *sources* 
... you'll use the one card you have for playback only.

>I am using btaudio for sound right now, and Im not sure how
>that works with multiple tuners.

The "in principle" qualification is this: your CPU does not have unlimited 
processing speed, so if you keep adding tuners to the system, you will 
eventually exceed its ability to encode and decode streams. Or (if you are 
using tuners with hardware encoding), at some point you will hit some other 
resource limitation, such as hard-disk transfer rate, memory allocation, or 
... well, those are the main ones I can think of. I guess bus speed, 
conceivably. What the actual bottleneck will be depends on all of your 
hardware.