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

[tortise]

On 7/06/2012 12:37 a.m., Stephen Worthington wrote:
> 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.

IMO there is a case for four tuners, that is three dedicated to 
recording and the fourth one for Live TV covers all cases upto one 
independent LiveTV frontend.  Even that falls over when there are Two 
independent frontends doing independent LiveTV.