[mythtv-users] minimize possibility input/capture card will be used for live TV

[James Miller]

0.27 MythTV system installed under gentoo. 3 capture cards, all USB. 2 
cards devoted to bringing in OTA, 1 hooked to the cable company DTA's "TV 
out" coaxial jack for recording SD. The last-mentioned card sees the most 
use since it is set to record a program each weekday.

The problem with this set-up is that, whenever I go to watch live TV, the 
system seems always to want to use the capture card hooked to the DTA--I 
presume because that is usually the last input from which the system 
recorded something. I don't want this behavior since that card has been 
acting a bit flaky, and its flakiness seems to be exacerbated by live-TV 
viewing. Rather I want the system, unless that input/capture card is the 
only one not recording (a remote possibility), to not use it for live TV 
viewing.

Looking around today I found 
https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Setup_Input_Connections, which seemed like it 
might provide a solution. There it says, under "live TV order," "When 
entering Live TV, the available, local input with the lowest, non-zero 
value will be used." So I thought I would just need to assign the 
input/capture card in question a higher value. But when I began 
investigating, I discovered that it already had the highest value: its 
value is set to 25, while the other OTA cards have values 18 and 14. So 
the system should be, from what I'm gathering, using one of those 2 inputs 
before it tries to use the one enumerated as 25. But that's not the 
behavior I'm seeing. The system seems, instead of honoring that numbering, 
to just want to tune live TV on whatever was the last-used input for 
recording.

So, am I misunderstanding something about how to minimize the possibility 
that an input/capture card will be used for live TV? I see also at the 
page I referenced that there is a way of preventing the input in question 
from being used for live TV altogether: "Setting this value to zero will 
make the input unavailable to live TV." I'd rather not go to that extreme, 
though, since there is a likelihood that I'll forget having made this 
configuration tweak and will wind up wasting a lot of time, should I ever 
want at some later juncture, to view live TV through that input, figuring 
out why I can't get that to work. Which is why I'm looking to minimize, 
rather than exclude, the possibility.

Input on this issue will be appreciated.