[mythtv-users] 3 Mux but recording schedule indicating using 4 tuners?

[tortise]

On 18/09/2011 7:26 p.m., Simon Hobson wrote:
> tortise wrote:
>
>> It seems relevant to observe that lots of hardware tuners is a good idea
>> if one wishes to concurrently use a good amount of myth capability!  My
>> design expectation was that I only needed 3 tuners, however as the 500's
>> came dual it seemed more sensible to match these, to reduce the
>> potential for driver (etc) issues.  The 4th tuner D4 was prioritised for
>> live TV and that seemed to justify its existence, however the above also
>> unexpectedly justifies its expense!
>
> One thought that comes to mind ...
>
> If you only have 3 muxes, then you could dedicate one tuner to each
> mux. I'm not sure of the steps required to do this (I only have one
> tuner, and 5 SD muxes) but I think you'd configure an input on tuner
> 1 and only create channels that are on mux 1; then you'd create tuner
> 2 and only add channels from mux 2 to it, and ditto for mux 3.
> That way, unless you exceed the number of virtual tuners, the
> scheduler will always pick one of those three tuners - ie the lowest
> number/highest priority tuner for any channel will be one of these
> three tuners, and one of them will always be tuned (or available to
> be tuned) to the mux required.
>
> Then you'd add your fourth tuner, add all the channels to it, and it
> should always be available for live-TV.

That's an interesting idea. Presuming it can be configured (can it?), 
that would mean (recalling the number of virtual tuners per tuner is 5), 
Mux 48 has 4 channels = OK, Mux 50 has 4 channels, also OK, Mux 59 has 
about 11 A/V channels. I am guessing one can assign 11 channels to one 
tuner this way and simply be limited to a max of 5 at a time. That's 
very unlikely to be a practical limitation for me, and if Tuner 4 is 
free it could overflow there in any event?

The fourth Tuner could float to any Mux as you say and this should, in 
theory for me anyway, work for almost all likely situations except where 
2 different frontends are concurrently running LiveTV from differing Mux 
(But the 2nd LiveTV FE may be able to pull the alternative Mux from the 
appropriate dedicated tuner in any event?) or if Mux 59 has overflowed 
to the 4th Tuner.