Finally confirmed... tuner priorities change over time

[pjpjpjpj]

I had thought this was the case and never really paid attention, but I have finally confirmed it.

I have two tuners (1 HDHR) that receive stations from one city, and another that receives a second city, both OTA. Therefore, I have two different channels for all the major networks - ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox. I used the tuner priority lines in the sage.properties file to assign city #1 tuners (call them A and B) as the top two priorities, and city #2 (tuners C and D) as the third and fourth.

After a reboot, everything is fine, and recordings are per priority. But, over time (days, perhaps weeks... I will try to determine), the priorities slowly change to where the city #2 tuners (C & D) are the priority, and all shows record on those tuners first.

All I have to do is reboot the server PC, and it goes back to priorities as I assigned them.

I clearly confirmed this last night when I looked at the recording schedule for the next two days, and every network show scheduled to record was going to be on the city #2 affiliates. I rebooted the server, and after I got it back up, all those shows were/are scheduled to record on the city #1 affiliate stations.

Note: this is not a big deal to me - both cities record fine and conflicts get resolved either way - I just thought it rather odd....

Anyone seen anything similar?

[GKusnick]

I assume you don't mean that the encoder_merit settings in your .properties file are changing on their own.

So what you're saying then is that after running for a while, you get into a situation where low-merit tuners are handling all the scheduled recordings while high-merit tuners sit idle. Is that right? Are you sure those high-merit tuners are really idle, and not malfunctioning, offline, tied up providing live TV to extenders that someone forgot to turn off, or something along those lines?

[pjpjpjpj]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

I assume you don't mean that the encoder_merit settings in your .properties file are changing on their own.

So what you're saying then is that after running for a while, you get into a situation where low-merit tuners are handling all the scheduled recordings while high-merit tuners sit idle. Is that right? Are you sure those high-merit tuners are really idle, and not malfunctioning, offline, tied up providing live TV to extenders that someone forgot to turn off, or something along those lines?

You are correct. Nothing changes in the .properties file. The higher-merit tuners sit idle. They are not offline, malfunctioning, tied up, etc. They are just idle. I can turn on an extender and tune into some other program "live" on one of those tuners if I wish. And as I said, a simple server reboot and Sage goes back to prioritizing the tuners correctly again.

I did that reboot (that caused me to post) this past Tuesday, 2/9. As of Thursday, our favorites were still recording on the prioritized tuners (city #1). But the Olympic Opening Ceremonies on Friday night recorded on city#2, and the upcoming recordings of Olympics this weekend are all showing city #2 as well. Unfortunately, there are few other shows on which to check this weekend (probably due to everything being re-runs because of the Olympics). But it appears that the switch back to city #2 (tuners c and d) occurred after about 3 days. If I wanted to bother, I could go reboot the server and it would switch the upcoming Olympic scheduled recordings back to city #1.

It's odd. It doesn't cause any issues whatsoever, it's just... odd.