[mythtvnz] Use different tuner for adjacent recordings

[lists at whitehouse.org.nz]

On Mon, 05 Apr 2010 22:36:08 +1200, Stephen Worthington
<stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz> wrote:

>>There is no global option for what you want (which is refered to as "hard
>>padding") - you just need to set the padding in the recording schedules.
>>
>>There is an option in the settings for "Time to record before/after a
>>show"
>>in Setup->TV Settings->General->General (Advanced) (the 4th screen). This
>>is
>>for "soft padding" which means that Myth will only record the padding
when
>>there are no adjacent shows and adjacent shows are not pushed to other
>>tuners. Sounds like you might have tried this before and I don't think
>>it's what you want.

Thanks everyone for your answers.  

That seems really stupid to me. Quite aside from not being intuitive (can
you imagine MySky having "hard" and "soft" padding?), I struggle to see the
benefit.  I don't actually want it to throw a conflict when I've run out of
tuners and have scheduled "hard padding" (say adjacent recordings on three
multiplexes), I just want it to use different tuners when they are
otherwise sitting idle so that I actually get my "soft padding" in the
recording.  Obviously the best solution would be if someone managed to make
it so that overlap padding (from two adjacent recordings on the same
channel on the same tuner) was recorded once but linked to both recordings
(which would solve the disk-use issue mentioned), or encoded once and
written to disk twice — it's even more important in analogue setups. If
anybody is keen to work on it, I would be keen to start a donation drive
and throw a little cash at the problem.

If the "soft padding" worked properly (ranking below an actual program but
utilising an otherwise-idle card), I wouldn't have thought MythTV would
need the default hard-padding rules (as the only time you would need them
would be for specific shows that you knew would likely end late). Setting
padding in two places is pretty odd, especially when it isn't clear what
difference it makes.

In addition, the sensible way to deal with it would seem to be through the
priority system that is already in there. A checkbox similar to the "try to
use a different tuner for adjacent recordings on different channels" saying
"try to use a different tuner for adjacent recordings on the same channel"
would be a much-preferred solution for people with multi-rec up and
running. Strangely, it seems that the upshot of all of this is that I can
get MythTV to do exactly what I want for adjacent recordings on different
channels, but cannot for adjacent recordings on the same channel.