[mythtv-users] Can the scheduler be made to treat certain sources as blacklisted for certain times?

Dan Wilga mythtv-users2 at dwilga-linux1.amherst.edu
Fri Aug 22 19:04:34 UTC 2014


On 8/22/14 2:49 PM, Gary Buhrmaster wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 6:20 PM, Dan Wilga
> <mythtv-users2 at dwilga-linux1.amherst.edu> wrote:
> ....
>> Dish Network receivers do pretty much the same thing. The only difference is
>> that you can configure when it happens. They say they do it in order to
>> check for possible firmware updates.
> What I heard is not so much they are checking for firmware (although
> they probably do that too), but that they are checking authorization.
> If a receiver does not get regular validation of its authorization, it
> eventually disables itself (requiring a drunken giraffe dance to reset).
>
Interesting, and quite plausible. Back when I first started with Dish, 
they charged an extra $5/month if you didn't connect your box to a phone 
line (so it could literally phone home using a built-in modem.)

But the kludge I alluded to is to create a DVR rule *on the Dish box* 
that pretends the VCR you don't really have attached to it will be 
recording from, say, 4:01 AM to 4:00 AM every day. Admittedly, I haven't 
tried this, but it's supposed to work, and doesn't preclude the tuner's 
channel from being changed when Myth really needs to record something. I 
haven't heard any complaints about people losing their auth, either. The 
only reason I haven't tried it is that I think the receiver still 
changes the channel at that time every day, so any in-progress recording 
will get messed up.

And, consider that I do have my boxes connected via Ethernet, anyway, I 
would think that's all that is really needed for auth updates. The boxes 
definitely talk to Dish whether power is off or not, for other reasons.

I actually like John P. Poet's suggestion of creating a rule in Myth to 
record at that time every day. In some ways it's even better than the 
thing I had tried, but never fully debugged, which was to send a 
"cancel" remote keypress to the receiver if "/usr/local/bin/mythshutdown 
-s" reports that something is recording. (The receiver puts up a dialog 
before sleeping, allowing the user to cancel and stay awake.)


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