[mythtv-users] Multirec-capable hardware? (was: 3 Mux but recording schedule indicating using 4 tuners?)

[Andre]

On 20 Sep 2011, at 11:57, Christopher Kerr wrote:
> 
> Essentially you can set it as high as your CPU (scheduler performance)
> and concurrent disk write speeds will allow. Obviously it makes no
> sense to set it higher than the maximum number of channels on a mux -

Yes it does, multirec is also very useful for overlaps.

There was some discussion a while ago about a special case two virtual channel multirec as a possible feature for single channel tuners like analog or capture cards, purely to handle overlaps nicely.


> in Australia that's around 5. I've got each of my three tuners set to
> 4 and it's always been sufficient.

A friend records all prime time stuff on all the main UK muxes, with 5 (useful) channels in a mux the maximum virtual channel use is 10 as sometimes all the channels have programme changes at once, this means he's had to change the max virtual tuners and recompile. I believe he uses 15 and has no performance problems on a 2 ish Ghz C2D with a couple of 2TB dedicated recordings disks.

That's pretty extreme and I've not seen more than 4 simultaneous on my system with 3 or 4 HD channels in a satellite mux, I set all my tuners to 5 and I've tested that 3 tuners can record 15 programmes at once with no problems. I suspect with modern cpus and disks that 5 is now a quite conservative limit.

Andre