Smart tuner selection?

[MickBurke]

I'm looking to rebuild my SAGETV system to do HD and am trying to save where I can. I'm wondering if I use 3 of the Hauppauge HD-PVR and an AVerTVHD 180 dual QAM tuner. What I'm wondering specifically is since only my locals are available via clear QAM, will sage be 'smart' enough to pick the right tuner for each channel. For example, if I am recording something on ABC at 8 and then two other things on Spike and TruTV at 9 will sage pick the QAM tuner for the ABC show, so that the two tuners that will tune the Spike and Tru will be available?

Thanks for any input...

[SWKerr]

I can only tell you how I think mine seems to work.

I have a DirecTV HD receiver attached to the HD-PVR: An analog tuner on another DirecTV HD receiver using the SVHS input: I also have an OTA card that receives all the Local TV stations. One DirecTV guide is shared by the HD-PVR and the analog tuner and the OTA has its own guide with different channel numbers.

I have setup tuner priories in the properties file with the HD-PVR first, the Analog DirecTV second and the OTA last. Note: since I have occasional Multi-path problems on some OTA channels I don't want to rely on the OTA card as the primary recording even though it has arguably the best picture quality.

Regardless of the Tuner priority Sage seems to want to pick HD content first. Occasionally it will pick the the OTA station over the HD-PVR even though it has a higher priority. For some reason, some of the DirecTV listings are not recognized as HD in the guide even if they are. If this happens for something that is on both the OTA channel and the DirecTV equivalent it will pick the OTA first.

I have started defining the specific DirecTV channel to make sure it will use the DirecTV feed if it is on a station that might have the multi-path issue. I then record the same thing again with the OTA channel specifically defined. That way even I have a bad OTA recording then I have an DirecTV analog backup to watch worst case scenario. I could pretty much solve this by getting another HD-PVR but the wife would like to get me something besides socks for Christmas so I must wait.

I can't really imagine what you need the clear QAM for if you will have three HD-PVRs but I guess there will be something that comes up. I would really be more concerned about having all those recoding hitting the same disk all at once. Normally multiple recoding are not enough to be a problem but I don't know about doing 4 HD sources at once. Might be the limit. Also: 3 HD-PVRs on one USB channel might push it as well. I had a USB chip that was so bad once that it had trouble at times with the VBox OTA tuner if anything else was working. I had to put in an aftermarket card just for the OTA tuner.

Be sure to post your experience.

[Opus4]

SageTV will attempt to assign scheduled recordings to tuners & timeslots that minimize any conflicts that prevent recording a show. If it can't record a show at one time, it will try to record another airing of that show if that will solve a conflict. Similarly, if using tuner A to record a show will cause a conflict, but using tuner B for the same recording will prevent the conflict, then tuner B will be used.

- Andy

[Djc208]

If you only have one recording scheduled for a time slot on ABC and nothing else, Sage will pick the tuner with the highest priority, which could be the HD-PVR. However if the 9pm recordings are padded to start at 8:58 then you would have a conflict between the 8pm recording and Sage should re-schedule the 8pm recording for any other tuner that can get that program.

If you set the tuner priorities with the QAM tuners highest then Sage should try and record everthing with those tuners first. Since that's only a few local channels anything like Spike or Discovery that doesn't exist in the QAM linup will fall to the "lower priority" HD-PVRs.

Naturally you can limit those favorites to only the QAM channels to prevent this problem but you risk creating conflicts when there are more QAM recordings than tuners since Sage won't automatically fall back to the HD-PVRs.

Also remember that Sage can try and re-schedule for time as Opus pointed out. So you may see it just re-schedule for a different time/date vice move to a different tuner.

[r00st3r]

In the sage properties file where the tuners are listed there is an item called merits. The higher the merit number, the higher the priority.

I checked mine and they were all set to 0, which means any tuner would be used if available. But I was testing out some things with my tuners (HDHomeruns), So I set them like this:

Tuner 1 = Merit 0 = Last tuner to be used.
Tuner 2 = Merit 1 = Third tuner to be used.
Tuner 3 = Merit 2 = Second tuner to be used.
Tuner 4 = Merit 3 = First tuner to be used.

This allows you to set a priority on your tuners should you have a notion to do so.