[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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