[mythtv-users] multi-encoder backend: confused about which chanels are on which encoder

[Seth Hettich]

Background:

I have a (headless) backend system with two capture cards:

* /dev/video0 is a pc3000 OTA tuner card

* /dev/video1 is a PVR-150 (connected to a dish network sat box)

I use have a zap2it feed for each one.

When I first set it all up everything worked fine for a few weeks.
Then I rebooted, and somehow myth seemed to "loose" one of the cards,
and got very confused.  In my panic to get at working again (I had
shows about to start!) I'm not sure exactly what I did to fix it (or
rather, I 'm not sure which of the things I did fixed it).  I think it
was doing a modprobe and re-running myth-setup and making sure the
cards were listed as before.

Then Monday morning I got up and saw that mythbackend had crashed, so
I restarted it.

Then last night I noticed in mythweb that the upcoming recordings made
no sense.  For example, it had a show on foodtv (ie dish network)
scheduled to be recorded on encoder2, then alter a show on HBO (also
dish) for encoder1.  It's not clear to me how you tell which encoder
is which card, but they clearly can't both be the PVR-150.

Looking in the logs I saw errors for recordings where it tried to
record something and it failed (ie it tried to tune the pc3000 to
channel two hundred somthing and it did not work out...).

I looked at my channels in mythweb, and almost all of them have a
source id of 1, and then the local OTA channels are in with a source
of 2 (as expected, I think).

I've gone back over the cards and settings in myth-setup over and
over, and it all seems fine.


Has anyone else ever seen this?  How can  I figure out which card myth
thinks encoderN is?  Is there some way to get it to give me a more
detailed explanation of how it's doing it's scheduling? (ie why does
it think that it can record HBO via the pc3000 when in myth-setup it's
"connected" to the "Local broadcast" zap2it feed).

Any ideas?

-Seth