[mythtv-users] multi-encoder backend: confused about which chanels are on which encoder

[Jarod Wilson]

On Feb 14, 2007, at 17:23, Seth Hettich wrote:

> Background:
>
> I have a (headless) backend system with two capture cards:
>
> * /dev/video0 is a pc3000 OTA tuner card
>
> * /dev/video1 is a PVR-150 (connected to a dish network sat box)
>
> I use have a zap2it feed for each one.
>
> When I first set it all up everything worked fine for a few weeks.
> Then I rebooted, and somehow myth seemed to "loose" one of the cards,
> and got very confused.  In my panic to get at working again (I had
> shows about to start!) I'm not sure exactly what I did to fix it (or
> rather, I 'm not sure which of the things I did fixed it).  I think it
> was doing a modprobe and re-running myth-setup and making sure the
> cards were listed as before.
>
> Then Monday morning I got up and saw that mythbackend had crashed, so
> I restarted it.
>
> Then last night I noticed in mythweb that the upcoming recordings made
> no sense.  For example, it had a show on foodtv (ie dish network)
> scheduled to be recorded on encoder2, then alter a show on HBO (also
> dish) for encoder1.  It's not clear to me how you tell which encoder
> is which card, but they clearly can't both be the PVR-150.
>
> Looking in the logs I saw errors for recordings where it tried to
> record something and it failed (ie it tried to tune the pc3000 to
> channel two hundred somthing and it did not work out...).
>
> I looked at my channels in mythweb, and almost all of them have a
> source id of 1, and then the local OTA channels are in with a source
> of 2 (as expected, I think).
>
> I've gone back over the cards and settings in myth-setup over and
> over, and it all seems fine.
>
>
> Has anyone else ever seen this?  How can  I figure out which card myth
> thinks encoderN is?  Is there some way to get it to give me a more
> detailed explanation of how it's doing it's scheduling? (ie why does
> it think that it can record HBO via the pc3000 when in myth-setup it's
> "connected" to the "Local broadcast" zap2it feed).
>
> Any ideas?

If I were a betting man, I'd say that /dev/video0 and /dev/video1 got  
inverted between the two cards from when you first set them up,  
assuming a "pc3000" is really a pcHDTV HD-3000. Look for evidence of  
which is which in dmesg output and /var/log/messages (or similar,  
depending on distro).

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com