[mythtv-users] Freeview & Freesat combined (UK DVBT & DVBS)

[Andre Newman]

I've been running a dual tuner Freeview (UK DVB-T) backend system (PS3  
& occasional Mac laptop frontend) for a year or two now with great  
success, my PVR has remained switched off for the last 9 or 10 months.
I have access to a friend's Freesat (UK DVBS) system for firewire  
drive "sneaker net" transfers of BBC HD and ITV HD recordings which is  
ok but delays watching the good stuff.

Last week our building had a communal satellite system installed so I  
now have a DVBS card as well as my dual tuner DVBT, which works well  
at a basic level but I'm looking for some wisdom from the list over  
the nuances of dual reception in the UK.
I never use live TV, I get all my schedule from EIT (tried uk_rt and  
the extra data is nice but it seems unreliable and a PITA day to day)  
and very rarely ever use the Myth frontend, although I have a VDPAU  
frontend (thanks JYA) to experiment with. I'm running the weekly  
mythbuntu builds on Ubuntu 8.04, Nova T 500 & Nova S plus cards with  
standard latest Ubuntu 8.04 kernel, 3 disks as separate directories in  
the default recording group.

I scoured the list and various wiki's and found some suggestions wrt  
setting up the DVBT cards first so they get priority for recordings  
(bizarrely DVBT is always better quality than DVBS for the same  
channel), I ignored the interleaving multirec virtual tuners  
recommendation as this was more to do with Live TV. Generally there  
seems little information about combining Freesat & Freeview that I can  
find yet it's clear that many people on this list are running this  
configuration.

I'm finding my system is scheduling the same show on Freeview and  
Freesat sometimes, when it understands that the same show is on both  
it often (not always) schedules for Freesat claiming that Freesat  
starts earlier! The schedules say exactly the same and I'd thought  
that DVBS would arrive later as it's got 44000 miles further to  
travel ;-)
Most of my schedules are "record on any channel" to make use of the +1  
channels to help with schedule conflicts, I'd hoped that the DVBS  
channel duplicates would get called in to help here too, sometimes  
they do but not in a consistent way.

Is there some accepted wisdom as to the best way to configure the  
cards or prioritise them that works well in the UK? Does is all work  
beautifully if you use uk_rt, if so I'll give it another go. How do  
others use this?

Is there still some issue with multirec and scheduling conflicts as  
sometimes it has conflicts that I can easily resolve by hand? I  
suspect that this is a "better in .22" thing.

What do others do with the multitude of regional variants of BBC, ITV  
CH4 etc? I've left them all in in case it gives a better chance to  
resolve a conflict or something nice pops up on a regional variant. I  
haven't ended up with a Welsh or Gaelic version of anything yet  
but.... I noticed that BBC CI & Cambridge is on the same mux as BBC HD  
so that should help with conflicts, would also be good to know if  
there is any variation in bit rate or resolution like the E4+1 is  
better than E4 situation on Freeview.

I'd also like to do clever things like recording BBC HD but if there's  
a conflict record the SD version, same with ITV HD, can't see how to  
do this.

Andre