[mythtv-users] 2 capture cards: want 1 dedicated to live TV, other to recording

Brad DerManouelian myth at dermanouelian.com
Wed Dec 17 05:40:16 UTC 2008


On Dec 16, 2008, at 9:25 PM, James Miller wrote:

> As I see it, the machine
> should be using the worse card for displaying live TV (of which I  
> watch
> very little) and using the better card to do all recording. Problem  
> is, no
> matter how many times I look through the settings, I can't seem to  
> find
> any way to "dedicate" one or other of the cards to each of the two  
> tasks.

There is no such setting. You can stop looking now.

> So my initial question is whether what I want to do is actually  
> possible?
> Can I assign the BT878 to live TV and the iTVC16 to recording  
> functions,
> so that any time I watch live TV it will come through the BT878,  
> while any
> time I schedule a recording the machine will record through the  
> iTVC16? If
> so, I'd like to ask for some pointers on how to do this.

MythTV assumes that when you tell it about a capture card that you  
actually want to use the card. MythTV also assume you would rather get  
a recording on the not-as-good-card than not at all. You can set the  
better card as a higher priority card. You can set LiveTV to avoid  
conflicts by using the lowest priority card for LiveTV. Also, you can  
set it to record programs later if they are available on the better  
card later (while risking losing the recording due to a conflict that  
might arise later). This is probably what you want.

If you *really* want to use the one card for *only* LiveTV, then don't  
tell MythTV about it and launch some other LiveTV-viewing program that  
uses your other card and ignores the card MythTV is using.

Again, there is no way to add a card to MythTV and then tell it to not  
use it for recording programs.

-Brad



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