[mythtv-users] Blocking out scheduler (Was: Upgrade plan)

[Simon Hobson]

"Michael T. Dean" wrote:
>Better would be to set all the recording rules to inactive.  This is the 
>approach designed for use when going on vacation or whatever.

Err, doesn't that just make it not  try to schedule anything ?
Remember the idea is not to prevent anything being scheduled, but to force the scheduler to use other showings etc as far as possible - and show conflicts where that's not possible.

Ie, in case it wasn't clear enough, I decide I need to do some maintenance on the system - but there are recordings scheduled. Now I can select each one in turn, and manually look to see if there are other showings, and try to guess whether those other showing are available without themselves causing tuner conflicts - but that's tedious.
So the idea is to use <some mechanism> to make all the tuners "not available to record with" for the time I have in mind to do the maintenance and let the computer do all the hard work - that is the point of having them after all. If all the recordings move to other showings then I'm fine, but if any conflicts show up then I can decide whether to do the work another time or live without the recording.

The only method that comes to mind is to set up (in my case) two dummy muxes with a dummy channel each - and schedule a manual (and high priority) recording on each for the period in question. That way the tuners are both in use, and the scheduler will have to do it's best to move everything around to suit. If, as is likely, I'm looking for a window for maintenance then I can move the manual recordings around and see what happens.

Anything easier to set up ?


"Michael T. Dean" wrote:
>>> I know it will suppress most activity of the channel but I have never
>>> tested to see if it stops scheduling too.
>> It does - just checked. I was fairly sure it did anway.
>
>Actually, it still schedules (and runs the scheduler).  It just doesn't 
>have any valid channels to use to record what it decides to record, so 
>it doesn't record anything.

Does it actually schedule recordings for channels that aren't visible - or ignore the schedule data for the channel ?
The way you describe it would mean that it could decide it should record something on a channel that's not visible - creating a conflict or at least having to schedule another recording for a different showing - and then leave a tuner idle. It could cause a perverse situation where there are recordings marked as conflict while there's a tuner idle that could record it.