[mythtv-users] Scheduling with 2 tuner cards.

[Darryl Merritt]

Hi all,

I have a MythTV V 0.18.1 backend with 2 identical DVico DVB-T Plus cards.

I notice that card #1 gets to do all the recording apart from when two programs overlap, and then 
the second card is used.

Is it possible to set MythTV to alternate the recordings between the 2 cards? I'm concerned that if 
the antenna cable comes adrift from the first card, all recordings will fail until someone notices.

I dont use the frontend part of MythTV, I have 2 x XBoxes as frontends and only watch the recorded 
programs, not live TV (I have a DVB-T set top box for that), so it could be a day or so before the 
non-recording is noticed. At least if the recordings are alternated between cards, then I'll only 
lose half the recordings.

I have a 10 minute extra recording delay set as the default. When a program being recorded directly 
follows another recording on the same channel, the same card is used for both of these recordings. 
At the end of the first recording, the file is closed and then a new file is started for the second 
recording. Most of the time, the first show runs overtime and the last few minutes ends up in the 
first part of the next recording.

This causes a problem when different people are recording the two shows. I was caught out when my 
show was on first, and the wife recorded the show straight after it. She watched her show soon after 
and then deleted it. I watched my show a few days later and found the ending of my show was in the 
recording of the next show.. which had been deleted. So I missed the ending.

Is it possible to use different cards for the two shows, each starting early and running over 
according to the default values? These 2 recordings were the only ones that night, so there wasn't 
any other recording pending to force this behavior.

I found a kludgey way around it by forcing my recording to run 15 minutes over which rescheduled the 
second show onto the other card. Maybe this and part 1 above could be added to the scheduling 
algorithm in the next version.


Cheers,
Darryl