[mythtv-users] Scheduling and a Part-Time Slave Backend

[Brad Benson]

I have a firewire-capable HD STB from Comcast and I'm experimenting with
using that as firewire capture device in Myth.  I currently only have one of
these boxes and the wife occasionally uses it to watch live TV.  What I'd
like to do is set it up as a capture device on a slave backend and then set
cron jobs to start up and shut down the backend service on that slave at
pre-defined time intervals (e.g. start slave backend service at 8pm and stop
slave backend service at 10 am).

How will the scheduler react to this?  Will it detect when the slave goes
away and re-run the scheduler to account for that?  Or will any recordings
scheduled for the slave during its downtime just get missed?

I currently have an HDHomerun and two PVR-500's in my master backend server
so I'd like for the firewire device to provide a third concurrent HD
recording.  However, if it's not available I'd prefer to record the SD
version of the show on one of the PVR devices rather than miss the recording
entirely.

Ideally I will get another of these boxes and dedicate it to Myth, but
Comcast gets enough of my money as it is and I don't relish the idea of
paying them an additional monthly fee just to test this out.

Does anyone know if this will work?  Or, if not, have any other suggestions
to accomplish what I'm trying to do?

Funny related story:  When I first started testing this it didn't occur to
me that someone might actually be watching live TV without using Myth so I
just scheduled some test recordings over firewire.  I noticed that most of
the firewire recordings seemed to be failing partway through.  A few days
later my wife asked me why the cable box kept magically changing to a
different channel when she was watching TV.  Of course, she was watching it
when Myth was trying to record so it would change channel and start
recording then she would change the channel back and interrupt the video
stream causing my recordings to die.  Oops.

Thanks for any help,
Brad
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