[mythtvnz] Overlapped recordings on ivtv cards?

[Nick Rout]

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 3:48 PM, Steve Hodge <stevehodge at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 10:56 AM, Dr. David J. Knowles
> <dknowles at clearfield.com> wrote:
>>
>> Soft padding is a global setting (set in Setup->TV
>> Settings->General->Advanced).
>> In this page you can set before recording time and after recording time
>> values. Soft padding
>> is added onto all programs recorded IF POSSIBLE. If the padding is not
>> possible it is ignored.
>> One example of soft padding being ignored is for adjacent recordings.
>> Adjacent recordings
>> stop at the moment the scheduled program ends. This leads to the problems
>> with the end
>> of programs appearing on the next recording.
>
> My understanding (and I may be out-of-date so please correct me if I'm
> wrong) is that soft padding is applied after the schedule is determined.
> This means that if you use soft padding and have two tuners capable of
> recording the two adjacent shows then the padding will not be applied and
> the shows will both be recorded on the same tuner. This is less than ideal,
> particularly for people who have say analogue Sky on one tuner and then DVB
> multirec on another - the soft padding will be lost on shows on Freeview
> unnecessarily.
>
> If Mythbusters is the only case where this issue is coming up frequently,
> just let it record another showing: both the current season and the earlier
> season repeats are shown multiple times per week.
>
> It'd be great if the scheduler were able to handle padding better.
> Unfortunately it's not as simple as it first seems and the scheduler itself
> is a complicated piece of code. That's why multirec is implemented the way
> it is - having "virtual tuners" may be a bit of a hack (with its unnecessary
> requirement of pre-determining how many you might need), but it meant it
> could be implemented without a lot of changes to the scheduler. I believe
> there's been one aborted attempt to get the scheduler handling padding
> better, so I suspect it'll be a while before anyone tries again.

I guess it would theoretically possible to back-to-back on same
analogue channel by writing the stream during the overlap period to
two files. Kind of like the tee command works in a shell. However this
could only work on the SAME channel and would obviously involve a lot
of coding.

Ironically the analogue codebase may get some serious attention as the
result of the US switching over. For many US users the only way to use
myth is via an analogue encoder plugged into a STB.