Assign tuners to watch or record only?

[Khristopher]

Is it possible with Sage to specifically designate a tuner for either Live TV Only or Recording Only?

I have 4 HW tuners and a SW tuner in my HTPC. I'd like to use the SW tuner to Watch TV only. Is it possible to assign specific jobs like that to tuners?

[GKusnick]

No. When assigning tuners to recording tasks, Sage doesn't distinguish between scheduled recordings and spur-of-the-moment recordings (which is what Live TV amounts to).

Imagine a scenario like this: you're sitting down to watch program X live. Meanwhile, some other family member in another room is setting up a manual recording for program X. Which tuner should it use, the one you've designated for live TV, or the one you've designated for recordings? Either way, somebody's going to be surprised.

The best way to avoid such ambiguities is to treat all recording tasks the same, and not try to guess what counts as "live" and what counts as a "recording". That's the rule Sage uses.

[Khristopher]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

Imagine a scenario like this: you're sitting down to watch program X live. Meanwhile, some other family member in another room is setting up a manual recording for program X. Which tuner should it use, the one you've designated for live TV, or the one you've designated for recordings? Either way, somebody's going to be surprised.

In my mind, the manual recordings and Favourite recordings would be handled by tuners which are specified as "Record" tuners.

For someone watching live it, it would first use tuners that were designated as Live TV Only, and then use other tuners if more than one Live instance was started.

This would be the ideal functionality for me......but thank you for answering the question.

[GKusnick]

My point was that it's possible for the same recording (program X in my example) to be both "manual" and "live" at the same time. One user wants it to be recorded using tuner A (the one designated for recordings) and the other user wants it to be recorded using tuner B (the one designated for live TV). There's no rule you can devise that will satisfy both of them (at least not without wasting tuners, disk space, and bus bandwidth by recording the same program twice).

Maybe I should ask what specific problem you're trying to solve by micro-managing tuner assignments in this way? Why is it important to you that the software encoder always be used for live TV, and never for anything else? Maybe there's another way to accomplish your real goal, whatever that may be.

[Khristopher]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

Why is it important to you that the software encoder always be used for live TV, and never for anything else? Maybe there's another way to accomplish your real goal, whatever that may be.

The only real reason is that the quality of my SW card isn't as good as my HW cards and I'd prefer not to use it for recording. As it stands right now, I haven't even setup the SW card from within Sage to prevent it from being used at all.

[Lester Jacobs]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

No. When assigning tuners to recording tasks, Sage doesn't distinguish between scheduled recordings and spur-of-the-moment recordings (which is what Live TV amounts to).

Imagine a scenario like this: you're sitting down to watch program X live. Meanwhile, some other family member in another room is setting up a manual recording for program X. Which tuner should it use, the one you've designated for live TV, or the one you've designated for recordings? Either way, somebody's going to be surprised.

The best way to avoid such ambiguities is to treat all recording tasks the same, and not try to guess what counts as "live" and what counts as a "recording". That's the rule Sage uses.

I've had the same feature request as the OP for years now and to my mind his request makes sense. The scenario you describe above is easily solved. The answer is that one of the Record tuners would be used to watch program X. Even though one person "thinks" they're watching this particular program as Live TV, in reality it needs to be recorded for another user and therefore a recording tuner should used.

Live TV tuners are to tbe used where the person simply starts watching a show (perhaps choosing one from the program guide) and that show has not been previously designated as a manual or favourite recording.

One of the few times that confusion could arise is if someone starts watching a show as Live TV and then, halfway though the show, decides they want to record it. In that case Sage would effectively be forced to use a Live TV as a recording tuner. Assuming this is an infrequent occurrence then I'm sure the occasional recording done using a designated Live TV tuner would not be a problem.

One way to implement this behaviour is to have two merit values per tuner; a recording merit and a Live TV merit. Manual and Favourite recordings would choose tuners based on Recording merit order and adhoc Live TV viewing would choose tuners based on the Live TV merit order. This would allow, for example, lower quality or "flaky" tuners to be primarily used for Live TV viewing while higher tuners could be mainly utilised for Recordings.

Cheers
Lester

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by Khristopher

As it stands right now, I haven't even setup the SW card from within Sage to prevent it from being used at all.

If this is working for you without conflicts -- i.e. if four tuners is enough -- then maybe the best solution for you is not to use the software tuner at all. Or you could add it with a very low encoder merit, so it's used only as a last resort.

Originally Posted by Lester Jacobs

One of the few times that confusion could arise...

I think there's more potential for confusion than that. Obviously the program won't be confused; it will make a definite decision in any given case. But if the decision is based on facts that aren't readily apparent to the user (like what other users are doing in other rooms, or what IR is doing under the hood), then users are sometimes going to be surprised by the results, and think the program is broken even when it's working correctly. That's the confusion I'm worried about.

That said, it seems to me what's really being wished for here is some way of saying "I want to keep this program and watch it many times, so use a good tuner for that" or "I'm going to watch this program just once and then delete it, so it's OK to use a crappy tuner for that." In other words, the problematic live-v.-recording distinction is a red herring; the real concern is throwaway-v.-keeper. So maybe the real solution would involve using favorite priority or recording quality to influence tuner selection, or something along those lines. This might help to avoid any surprises due to live-v.-recording ambiguity.