[mythtvnz] Just how cheap could you build a system? Possibly OT.

[Stephen Worthington]

On Wed, 06 Jun 2012 20:42:10 +1200, you wrote:

>Interesting. I have a dual tuner myth system and I almost never find I 
>need a third tuner. Do the commercial PVRs support recording more than 
>one show per mux? Myth does which means you could record simultaneously 
>every show broadcast by TVNZ and Mediaworks for instance. Or do you 
>really need to record from all three muxes simultaneously?

It is fairly rare for a lot of people to need a third tuner, but it
certainly does happen, especially if you watch things on Prime.  My
mother almost never does need three, but I typically do at least once
a week.  Last year I had at least two periods where I had high
priority recordings on all three multiplexes at once recurring each
week at the same time.  The TV3+1 channel can help, but that is only
broadcast in SD, not HD like TV3.  The really bad problem comes with
the preroll and postroll needed to capture an entire programme, given
our broadcasters' propensity to say that they really have to broadcast
the ads and to hell with the advertised schedule.  The MythTV
scheduler will cut off default preroll and postroll and switch to
another multiplex when it runs out of tuners and that can cause you to
miss the start of a program, or much worse the end.  If you set it up
with forced preroll and postroll, it will drop recording of an entire
lower priority program, rather than start it when it could after the
clash period ended.  So I would recommend three tuners for any heavy
TV watcher.