[mythtv-users] Overlapping recordings on SAME channel w/ one tuner

[f-myth-users at media.mit.edu]

    > Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2010 19:48:43 -0400
    > From: "Michael T. Dean" <mtdean at thirdcontact.com>

    > IMHO, your buying additional capture cards is /immensely/ cheaper than 

"Cheaper"?  Once written, code is free.*  Until written, though,
"buying additional capture cards" is very very -far- from free:

    > the amount of code required to do what you're asking.

Aaaand---

More set-top boxes.

More money to the cable company every month for each of those boxes.

More PCI slots (or equivalent) to stick those capture cards into.

More entire backends and motherboards if you don't have enough of the
above slots.  (Yeah, yeah, -some- tuners use USB.  Not all.)

More power for all of the above.

More splits on the incoming signal; how soon before you need an amp as
well?  Plus more noise because of the splits, which will eventually
take out even digitally-transmitted data.  Plus yet -more- power for
that amp, and yet -another- single point of failure on your entire
feed if it goes down.

For people unlucky enough not to have working serial ports on their
STB's, more blasters, plus all the concommittant hair with making
those (a) reliable and (b) not crosstalk into other STB's and (c)
perhaps you don't have enough of some limited resource (like serial
ports) for those STB's without extra additional serial muxes...

More volume (especially those hot, power-hungry, large STB's).

Hence, more things that can break, more money, more setup, more more more.

But every time this comes up, you just say "buy more hardware".

This doesn't scale -nearly- as well for people who, unlike you, use
STB's.  You know that not everyone is OTA-only.  Since I can't
remember if I've ever broken down and listed all the reason this
isn't really a scalable solution, I have now.

A while back, this was typically dismissed as, "Well, analog's on the
way out, and virtual tuners have been implemented for many/most of the
digital feed methods."  But, of course, in the meantime, cable
companies have kept turning off/downscaling/breaking pretty much
everything but an analog channel out of a cable box.  Which keeps
people needing analog capture in many cases (even in HD, in some
cases).

Unfortunately, between the "this will all work once everyone goes
digital" and the "just buy more hardware" camps, there wasn't a
whole lot of motivation left for people in general to actually
get virtual tuners implemented for analog sources, because it
didn't look likely that patches would be accepted.  (At least,
that's sure how I saw it.)

So nobody's bothered putting in the functionality, and so here
we sit, years after virtual tuners went into Myth, with the same
problem I and others have been talking about for years before that.

My conclusion:  Saying "just buy more hardware" doesn't cut it for
many people, but instead tends to make people believe that fixing
the problem in software either shouldn't happen or won't get
integrated even if it did.  Since there seems to be no interest
in the devos for it, and everyone who brings it up on the mailing
list hears discouraging words and hence non-devos figure "this will
never fly", nothing ever changes---including the same New Idea being
mentioned every six months or so by someone who hasn't already gotten
discouraged.

Instead, saying, "Nobody's written the code yet, but we would eagerly
incorporate it into Myth if it was" would be a much better response,
in my opinion.

P.S.  It occurs to me that US OTA-only people may also think that
reusing a tuner for overlapping recordings is a rare event, because
most of the OTA networks seem to run very different shows back to
back, hence it might be unusual that you'd have a same-channel
overlap.  But many of the cable channels that air lots of (say)
documentaries or genre fiction tend to run several-show theme bundles,
where you have 2, 3, or sometimes even 20(+) of a similar sort of thing
(possibly even different episodes of the same series) back to back,
making such overlaps very common.  I know for a fact that they are
extremely common in my recording mix, and I therefore have more
hardware than I might otherwise be able to get away with because of
that, and because I apply hard pre-/postrolls to everything.
( (+) The Science Channel, IIRC, recently aired a SIX DAY marathon
of hundreds of episodes of How It's Made.  Yowza. :)

P.P.S.  It seems to me that invoking the whole softpadding debate is
a red herring.  Being able to dasiy-chain multiple recordings off a
single tuner isn't the same thing.  If the Myth scheduler were a TMS,
this would be relatively easy to do (but I will elide some potential
solutions here for because this is already long).  The BUSQ, OTOH,
makes solving this less obvious to me.

(*) Yeah, yeah, I can hear it already:  "Maintenance!"  But what
about all the "maintenance" of people who are maintaining all that
extra hardware to handle what should be getting handled by the
software?  You don't notice that, because it's all spread out
across the user base and not lines of code you can see in the tree.
Plus the ongoing costs in power and subscriptions.  I know you're
sensitive to power-efficiency issues given your comments about 80+
power supplies---just -think- of the environmental footprint of all
those extra STB's, most of which are far from efficient because why
should the cable company care about its subscribers' power bills?

I probably won't have time to really respond to more in this thread,
btw; please don't take it personally.  I've already gone on at way
more length than anyone will probably read anyway.  Sorry about that.