Tuner Selection Surprise

[jmooremcc]

My Windows backend server running nextPVR V5 has a Hauppauge quad tuner. As a test, I had 3 Kodi Matrix clients tune to local channel 7 exactly at 6 PM. I then went to the backend server to see how the tuners were allocated. I was expecting all 3 clients to be assigned to one tuner.  But to my surprise, one client was assigned to tuner 1 and two clients were assigned to tuner 2. 

If I had wanted to record 3 additional channels, either I would have been prevented from doing so or one of the tuners assigned to live TV clients would have been hijacked. 

I'm curious,  why weren't all three clients requesting the same channel assigned to only one tuner?

[mvallevand]

Sub has posted on this before, he doesn't optimize live TV's use of tuners because of an assumption, that users watching live tv might often want to a tuner to change channel. Do you get different behaviour if you change config.xml and don't reverse priority for Live TV?

Martin

[jmooremcc]

Thank you for your response, Martin.
I've tried the setting you suggested (reverse priority for Live TV). For everyone's benefit, that setting causes nextPVR to assign LiveTV tuners from bottom to top instead of top to bottom. Recordings will still choose tuners from top to bottom. In my case with 4 tuners, LiveTV will assign tuners starting with tuner4, then tuner3, etc and Recordings will continue to acquire tuners starting with tuner1, then tuner2, etc.

I think the setting will help some, but because tuner assignments are not optimized (meaning multiple requests for the same channel will not be assigned to the same tuner) the tuner conflict that occurs when the number of available tuners for recordings becomes zero, will occur much sooner than under an optimized system. The result will be a Live TV client losing their tuner.

I know Sub has a lot of higher priority items on his plate but it is my hope that tuner optimization will one day make it onto his TODO list.

John

[mvallevand]

I don't think this is a to do item, since as I explained, this is how sub wants it to work as it makes live tv channel changes faster.

Martin