[mythtv-users] Vbox multirec in Australia

[Stephen Worthington]

On Tue, 5 Dec 2017 10:25:39 +1100, you wrote:

>Hello,
>
>If anyone has had some experience in setting up a Vbox tuner in Australia
>using multirec, I would be interested in how that was done.
>
>I'm currently on 0.28 and have a Vbox, which works OK for a single recording
>per tuner and I understand I have to upgrade to 29 to use multirec.
>
>However, the Vbox setup is a bit different to standard tuner cards and
>network devices such as HDHomerun.
>
>What is a bit puzzling is how Mythtv scheduler knows which channels are on
>the same multiplex.  It would seem that information is not available from
>the tuner, as would be the case for other cards.
>
>In Australia we have about 20 channels shared across 5 multiplexes, so
>multirec needs to know whether a potential recording is on the same
>multiplex and hence can use the same tuner or not.  This is different to the
>UK which is what I can find for discussions on multirec and VBox. 
>
>
>Thanks,
>
>Andrew

I do not know exactly how the VBox protocol works, but I would expect
that it would still need to tell the VBox what frequency to tune its
tuner to somehow.  By definition, all the channels of a multiplex are
on one frequency.

According to their documentation, you should be able to download a
playlist file with all the channel URLs using a URL like this:

http://XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:55555/httpChannels.m3u8

(replace the XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX with the address of your Vbox).  If you
look at that, the URLs in it should give you an idea of how the VBox
is told what to tune to.  You might like to send us a copy, or post it
somewhere like pastebin.com.

The channel lineup in Australia will be different from the UK, but
they both use the same technology (DVB-T/T2), so how multiplexes work
in both countries will be identical.