FYI - How to change the merit of your tuners

[wayner]

I don't know that this is documented anywhere so I thought that I would add this thread.

The encoder merit property in Sage allows you to set the priority for which tuner will be used first. The default is that all tuners have a merit of 0. The tuner with the highest merit will be the one that will record first, pari passu. Prior to V9 the only way to change this was in the Sage.properties file.

With V9 you can turn on the ability to edit the merit by going to Detailed Setup - Customize. Scroll all the way down to the bottom and you will see an option to "edit merit priority values". Set this to Yes and then you should be able to go into the Setup Video Sources menu item and change the merit. You will see the merit on the first page of Source Setup that shows all of the tuners.

[KeithAbbott]

Does the priority behavior change immediately after you change the values, or is restarting the service necessary?

[wayner]

The merit seems to change immediately but I don't know if it will change the tuner for upcoming recordings.

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by wayner

The merit seems to change immediately but I don't know if it will change the tuner for upcoming recordings.

The schedule doesn't get completely rebuilt unless you restart SageTV or scheduling of shows is contentious enough that everything gets moved around. The merit changes will generally apply to newly scheduled airings and may also resolve a conflict if an encoder that has only a subset of channels from another encoder is given a higher priority.

[KeithAbbott]

Great information. I think I'll plan to restart the service whenever I make merit priority changes.

[waynedunham]

I noticed this setting in V9 and enabled it. Now on the setup video sources it shows the merit along with all the other settings for a tuner.

Makes it much easier to check and modify your encoder merit priorities.

[waynedunham]

I had to rebuild my SageServer and I know I had the option to display the encoder merit settings on the detailed setup menu before, but it isn't showing up now. On the other machine I am running it is located in the "Extra Options" section right under the option to generate thumbnails during imported video playback and just above the added options for plugins.

Any idea why I'm not seeing it now? I am on V9 on both machines.

I also just noticed a difference between the two machines, both on V9. On the one without the merit option if I go to setup/system info and hit the old "Jenny" code to enable what used to be called the unsupported extras it will toggle the dot in the upper left corner and also enable/disable what are now just called Extra Options.
But on the machine that does have the option for merit if I go to setup/system info and try to enter the old "Jenny" code (5309) it pops up a dialogue saying that the hidden extras are no longer hidden and offers me the option to enable all extra options, disable all extra options, or go to detailed setup and that option will pop you into the detailed setup section right where the extra options are.

Is there something in sage.properties that wakes up these features and also intercepts the entry of the old "Jenny" code? The reason I ask is that I had to use an older sage.properties in the rebuild (not terribly old, but from when I first upgraded to V9 a month or two ago)

The nicest part of this it shows and also allows you to add/change merit values for each source right in the sources section. Plus, for me at least, it then then also puts your tuners in order of merit in the parallel recording schedule. Something I'd always wished for!

*SOLVED* Turns out I had put the wrong SageTV7.XML in the STVs spot. Apparently it was an old XML from the V7 version which still had the "Jenny" stuff in there and didn't have the merit option. All is well now, I have the option and the merit values show up on the setup video sources for each tuner.

[Carlton Bale]

Thanks for posting this info; I didn't know this option was available. I prefer this to editing the ini file.

[bigbill]

Was looking for "edit merit priority values" as stated in first post, it actually says: "Add option to edit merit priority values on the Source Details menu" I missed that the first couple times i looked for it. I was looking for the first word to be "edit"....

Its the third choice from the bottom on my install. -Bill

[bigbill]

It appears now that you can also change the merit in the source setup too! Click on the tuner and click on the Merit Priority Value: at the bottom and enter the number you want. I just did it to my 4 tuners. Next on to the prop file to edit which tuner writes to which disk drive. -Bill

[waynedunham]

Originally Posted by bigbill

It appears now that you can also change the merit in the source setup too! Click on the tuner and click on the Merit Priority Value: at the bottom and enter the number you want. I just did it to my 4 tuners. Next on to the prop file to edit which tuner writes to which disk drive. -Bill

That's been in there for quite a while. I've been using that ability for a long time now.