[mythtv-users] Enabling multirec borks usability a bit.

Ian Armstrong mail01 at iarmst.co.uk
Tue Apr 20 20:33:31 UTC 2010


On Tuesday 20 April 2010, Douglas Peale wrote:
> Greg Oliver wrote:
> > On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 2:20 PM, Douglas Peale
> >
> > <Douglas_Peale at comcast.net> wrote:
> >> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> >> Hash: SHA1
> >>
> >> Jeff Wormsley wrote:
> >>> They'll want to use live TV as well, and it would
> >>> be nice if they could use it just like any other TV, which includes
> >>> surfing the channels with Chan+ and Chan- (and not worrying about the
> >>> NEXTCARD button, assuming my remote has enough buttons to map such a
> >>> thing in the first place, ala an AppleTV) as well as Guide (and don't
> >>> get me started about how much pain it is to use the Guide to actually
> >>> change the channel rather than schedule a recording, a completely
> >>> different issue).
> >>
> >> I want to make sure that this does not get over simplified.
> >>
> >> I have 5 tuners in my system, 3 tuners on cable, one tuner on a
> >> northwest facing antenna, and one on a south facing antenna. This means
> >> I get as many as 4 variants of a single station.
> >> On cable there are some stations that are available as analog, digital
> >> SD, and digital HD. That same station may also be available as OTA HD.
> >> Worse, at least one station is from a neighboring town, and the cable
> >> version of it gets blocked whenever the local affiliate feels like it.
> >> Usually the OTA HD quality is better than the cable HD quality, but that
> >> situation changes on certain stations that have mulipath issues OTA, and
> >> OTA station can also be affected by the weather. I have adjusted tuner
> >> and channel priorities so that recordings will be done on the highest
> >> quality source for the programming.
> >>
> >> While I can assign any channel number to any station, I have assigned
> >> the digital SD and analog stations the same numbers so that they match
> >> the numbers that show up in the guides. This means, for example, that I
> >> have an analog channel 2, a digital SD channel 2, a cable HD channel
> >> 2.1, and an OTA HD channel 2.1, all with the same programming.
> >>
> >> When using live TV and selecting channel 2, which variant of channel 2
> >> should live TV choose? I need to be able to access all variants to be
> >> able to test the setup and to see if the cable company has played
> >> musical channels again, but if I'm channel surfing, I'd like to just
> >> surf the best quality variants of the channels.
> >
> > As long as the channel number and xmltvid are different for each
> > channel, they will all show up in the epg, and you can separately
> > select them.  Once you do like a lot of us, and match them for the
> > same show from different sources, you will need to use tuner
> > priorities to determine what order for recording to follow for the
> > same broadcast.
> 
> The flaw in this is that if you have multiple sources for the same channel,
>  when a recording screws up, it is difficult to identify the source that
>  screwed up since that is not saved with the recording. This makes it
>  difficult to track down intermittent reception problems. For this reason,
>  I have given each channel a unique name. This lets me identify the source
>  of the recording when there is a problem, but also causes duplicate
>  listings in the EPG.

It depends on the setup, but I have an analogue card which overlaps some 
digital stations. Though not immediately obvious through the front end, I just 
use the filename to figure out the source. For example, looking at my current 
recordings, I've some filenames which begin with 1004_ & others 4004_. Both 
are the same channel, but I know the one starting with a 1 is the analogue 
tuner, while the 4 is digital.

-- 
Ian


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