HDHomeRun DVR and SageTV sharing tuners

[b-morgan]

I have two HDHR3-US dual tuners and one HDHR5-4US quad tuner installed in my network. I have HDHomeRun software installed on multiple devices and have subscribed to their DVR service. All of the tuners are configured in SageTV as well.

What happens when both the HDHomeRun software and SageTV want to record at the same time? I.E. does each tuner report busy regardless of what software is using it?

If the tuner doesn't report busy, what is the best way to set things up so that I minimize conflicts?

[Tiki]

Sage has no concept of sharing tuners. It assumes that all tuners are available all the time (except for the tuners Sage is already using). If Sage tries to use a tuner that is being used by a different program, it will just report an error and keep trying to record on that tuner until the recording eventually fails.

If you use SageDCT (which is really meant for cable card tuners like the hdhr prime), it can optionally do some tuner pooling. So if one tuner is busy it will detect it and can use an alternate tuner in the pool.

[nyplayer]

OPenDCT for SageTV does pooling and can share Connects and Primes with other APPS... It checks for usage and will move on to next available tuner.

https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=62774

Tuner Pooling.
This new feature enables OpenDCT to intelligently select a tuner based on merit and lock status in that order. It does two passes over the tuners. The first one tries to find the highest merit tuner that is not currently in use by SageTV; it checks each one in order to see if it's locked. If they are all either in use or locked, it then it goes through a shorter list of tuners not in use by SageTV, but locked and checks if it's allowed to unlock any of them forcefully. If it's not allowed on any of them, then it gives up. These locked checks are surprisingly fast. Since the InfiniTV devices do not have a locked indication like the HDHomeRun Prime devices, enabling pooling with only InfiniTV devices will just remap them based on merit.
To enable the pooling feature change the property pool.enabled from false to true.
Because of this new feature, the force unlock feature is now set per capture device. To enable forced unlocking, change the value of sagetv.device.<unique_id>.always_force_external_unlock to true for each device that you want this feature enabled on. The global setting no longer has any effect.
Merit is set by changing the value of sagetv.device.<unique_id>.encoder_merit. Higher numbers mean higher priority. This is also the merit that will be sent on discovery.
Pools are automatically assigned based on capture device type the first time you run OpenDCT. You can change the pools by changing the value of sagetv.device.<unique_id>.encoder_pool to another name for all of the capture devices that you want to put into a different pool. The name is case sensitive. Also be sure to not have any extra spaces. I highly do not recommend putting capture devices that cannot tune the same channels into the same pool. It will create a problem per paragraph two in the issue created for this feature.