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ablack42 · 2014-05-19, 05:45

I have a Win 7 box running ServerWMC with a Ceton infinitv 4 and a couple XBMC front ends. Some running Win 7 and another running xbmcuntu. Here are the two things that would help with the wife acceptance factor.

1. When we are watching a channel and a recording is scheduled to start for that channel, the back end yanks the tuner. For example, we are watching a show on Fox at 8:58 and a recording scheduled for 9:00 on Fox starts up. We receive a message that the "tuner is needed for a recording". There are other tuners available but it really wants the one we already have tuned to the channel. The way we deal with it is go back to the channel again and force it to use another tuner. Thoughts on how to make it so the new recording is forced to pick up another tuner, assuming one is available?

2. Whenever I open the EPG fresh, as in not currently watching TV, it starts at the lowest channel number. Is there any way to make this start at the channel last tuned or specify a start channel? We have Comcast cable and generally only watch HD channels. Since they are all clumped together in the 800s, that's usually what we browse. Having it start where we left off would be a convenience to make the wife happy.

scarecrow420 · 2014-05-19, 06:29

1. Is a known issue and we arent sure there is anything we can do to influence what tuner WMC wants to take for the recording. Krusty may have more indication as to whether there are any more avenues as yet un-pursued

2. is outside the scope of what we (a PVR addon) can do, it's a general XBMC PVR framework issue but certainly a worthy suggesti9on. I believe it may have already been suggested/discussed but no harm in adding in your 2 cents. This thread is a good place to mention it: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid...pid1713178

As per that thread, there are already changes implemented for post Gotham release to allow jumping to channels in the EPG by entering numbers on the EPG screen, eg if you entered "8-0-0" on your remote, it would take you there quickly... so at least that will make life easier for you once we reach post Gotham

spaceboy · 2014-05-19, 10:58

1 is the same problem when watching live tv in wmc. the solution is not to watch tv live. it is not going to be fixed

ablack42 · 2014-05-19, 14:45

(2014-05-19, 10:58)spaceboy Wrote: 1 is the same problem when watching live tv in wmc. the solution is not to watch tv live. it is not going to be fixed

Actually, I was using wmc with an xbox360 as an extender before switching to xbmc. The only time it took over a tuner was if there weren't any others available.

krustyreturns · 2014-05-19, 16:27

1 is a hard problem, wmc wasn't written to work as a server so most of what we do with it is unnatural. I believe it's possible for swmc to grab a tuner for a live-tv stream in an exclusive mode, so that the rec service can't take it away - this should force it to grab an unused tuner. The danger then is that live-tv has priority over recordings and from the beginning I wanted to make sure recordings always happen.

Its possible to try and anticipate ahead of time when tuners become sparse and stop streams ahead of time, but this starts to make swmc have to deal with scheduling and starts to become ugly fast. And really the problem only happens if you happen to be watching the channel the recording is about to start on, making big architectural changes for this special case doesn't seem worth it to me.

As always though we are open to suggestions.

scarecrow420 · 2014-05-19, 23:40

I do think that alot of people would have a typical use case where they are watching a prime time show that they also schedule to record. Personally I only record stuff that we arent going to be around to watch but I can see how for other people it could actually be "normal".

Perhaps rather than trying to lock a tuner and causing the possibilit of scheduled recordings not being honoured, we could "assist" by automating the workaround instead - when a live stream stops due to the rec service wanting that tuner for a scheduled recording on the same channel, we could send a special flag back to the client which would cause it to send a OpenRecordingStream request (ie, what the user would do anyway)

Dilligaf · 2014-05-19, 23:51

(2014-05-19, 16:27)krustyreturns Wrote: 1 is a hard problem, wmc wasn't written to work as a server so most of what we do with it is unnatural. I believe it's possible for swmc to grab a tuner for a live-tv stream in an exclusive mode, so that the rec service can't take it away - this should force it to grab an unused tuner. The danger then is that live-tv has priority over recordings and from the beginning I wanted to make sure recordings always happen.

Its possible to try and anticipate ahead of time when tuners become sparse and stop streams ahead of time, but this starts to make swmc have to deal with scheduling and starts to become ugly fast. And really the problem only happens if you happen to be watching the channel the recording is about to start on, making big architectural changes for this special case doesn't seem worth it to me.

As always though we are open to suggestions.

Perhaps an option to set live tv priority over recordings? In my situation I have 6 tuners so there's always extras available for recording

krustyreturns · 2014-05-19, 23:58

Interesting idea. It would be cool if we could do it without changing the client, but I guess we would need to. Of course there would be a pause in the live tv stream but that's better than just stopping I suppose.