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

[James Miller]

On Wed, 17 Dec 2008, Jon Bishop wrote:

> Don't totally dismiss his priorities suggestion, it really isn't that
> complicated. You have 1 setting in mythtv-setup, go to your sources
> section, and pick the higher quality source, and set it's priority to
> a positive number... or set the bttv card to a negative priority...
> then in the general frontend setup, select avoid conflicts from
> livetv, and it will automagically default to that lower priority card
> when you want to watch livetv. This will allow the card to still be
> used for recordings as well - alternatively, as Brad mentioned, you
> can setup the livetv menu option to launch another software tv player,
> but this requires editing your theme settings.

Yeah, after initially inclining toward the theme-settings-edit option, I 
began to reconsider whether the simpler, and equally effective option, 
might not be to set capture card priorities. I looked at the link Brad 
provided and, despite my technical deficiencies, I'm pretty sure I could 
implement that option--though it would take some time and experimentation. 
But reflecting on how little liveTV I watch, I began to conclude that, 
were I to set card priorities, there could almost never be an instance 
when a recording would be made from the lower quality card due to some 
conflict.

To attach some concrete figures to this, I'd say that not more than 10% of 
my viewing is liveTV. That's not to say that, out of 2 hours of viewing on 
a given day I watch 12 minutes of liveTV. But rather that, say, out 60 
hours of watching in a given month, I might watch 6 1 hour programs on 6 
different days. But like I said that's a pretty liberal estimate, and I 
think the more typical scenario would see me watching even less than that. 
So I'm now leaning toward the capture-card-priority-tweaking option after 
all.

My first questions with regard to that have to do with specific numbers I 
might set and whether both cards should be affected. From your remarks I 
gather that setting the better quality card's priority to _any_ positive 
number will bring about the desired effect, correct? So is there no need, 
then, to in addition set the poorer  quality card's priority to a negative 
number? Were I to do that, what effect--good or bad--could it have?

Thanks to Brad, Jon, et al for the helpful input on this issue.

James