[mythtv] Dual tuners, LiveTV, why must LiveTV always be interrupted?

[Bruce Markey]

Joe Votour wrote:
...
> Mainly (as I've explained), I'm looking to be able to
> watch LiveTV on one card (for instance, the baseball
> playoffs are on), and be able to have recordings at
> the same time get sent to another card (I really like
> Married With Children, but I'd rather have that record
> than the baseball game).  Whether this is automatic,
> or I get the dialog box telling me the recording is
> starting, I honestly don't care, as long as there is a
> way to have it record on another card, so that I can
> watch the baseball game uninterrupted (i.e. without
> having to drop back to the main menu, waiting 30
> seconds and then entering LiveTV mode).

In the baseball game, hit "M" then "R". "M" brings up the
EPG with the current show selected and the video running in
the corner. "R" instantly starts single record of the selected
show.

A three hour sporting event is something I definitely don't
want to watch from the ringbuffer! If you schedule the
baseball game ahead of time, you'll have a chance to look
at the conflicts page make decisions and know what to expect.
If you discover a game is on after it has started, start
recording ASAP. Once it is recording you are free to go to
menus and start watching from the "Watch Recordings" page
whenever you please. I like to be 20 or 30 minutes behind
for baseball games so I can skip commercials, FF thru mound
visits and foul balls, etc. If I get caught up, I exit, go
watch something else and come back to the game later. Assuming
that "Married With Children" starts at a later time, you can
even channel surf while the ballgame records.

Any way you cut it, one tuner is used for baseball and one
for the Bundys. What I'm suggesting is that you're better
off recording both rather than thinking you need to watch
one of them as Live TV.

> But yes, logically, you are correct - the scheduler
> seems to want to start recordings with cardid 1, so
> moving LiveTV to cardid 2 (in my case, since I have
> two tuners) would free up cardid 1 for recording. 

More specifically, the scheduler picks the first available
cardinputid for the sourceid of the channel of the show.
Assuming you have one video source and one input per card
then input 1 is on card 1 and input 2 is on card 2 and all the
channels are on sourceid 1. It gets a little more complex if
there are two sources and both the s-video and coax inputs are
used on the same card(s).

Note that I suggested "last available card". Consider if you
have a recording from 8:00-9:00 and a movie from 8:30-11:00 on
the second card. At 9:00, card 2 is busy but card 1 is free.

> The only thing that I can think of with your
> suggestion that doesn't seem right is ignoring the
> hostname details (I haven't looked at this code, so I
> might be wrong here) - I don't use multple backends
> myself (I have everything on one PC), but I can see a
> situation where somebody might prefer one backend over
> another for LiveTV.

It used to simply choose the first available card, normally on
the master. A few months ago people complained that it should
use the local tuner if there was a backend on the same machine
as the remote frontend where the user wanted to watch Live TV.
I added this hostname check so that it will try to use a local
tuner if possible and this is the way it currently works. All
I'm saying is, for what you want, it should skip the hostname
comparison and always use the last available tuner so that it
will only prompt you when the very last tuner is needed.

--  bjm