Removing a tuner without losing scheduled recordings

[djtaylor]

I have 4 DVB-T tuners, 3 PCI and one USB.

I want to remove the USB one and probably replace it with a DVB-S except that I know that gbpvr allocates a tuner when a recording is scheduled rather than dynamically actually at the record time.

The issue here is that I have a lot of scheduled recordings and in the past, when removing and re-adding tuners, ended up missing some recordings because the tuner number in the database didn't match the expected tuner number.

Has this implementation changed at all? If I were to remove the USB tuner, is that going to cancel all the scheduled recordings just on that tuner and then when the pending recordings process checks, re-create the scheduled recording on an alternate available tuner or am I likely to end up in a mess?

Last time, I ended up hand editing the recording schedule in the database but i'd rather not do that if possible, I want an easy life

David.

[bgowland]

Hmmm, I dropped one of my tuners a few months back but can't remember what I did to prevent losing scheduled recordings.

It's probably easier if all of your scheduled recordings are part of reoccurring schedules rather than one-offs. If you have one-offs then make a note of them.

If I was going to do it again, the first thing would be to backup my gbpvr.db3 file (just in case).

Then I'd empty my EPG (commandline 'gbpvr -onlyemptyepg'), start Config and delete the cap. source, remove the device drivers from Device Manager, shutdown the machine and physically remove the device.

On startup, go to the GB-PVR app. and use the System plugin to Update EPG (don't ask me why but I find this the easiest way to update the EPG in realtime). Doing this should rebuild the reoccuring recording allocations. Add back the one-off recordings.

I'd be fairly confident this would work. If not - I'd still have the backup of the db3 to start again.

Cheers,
Brian

[Nomad101]

I would suggest doing as bgowland said but with one extra step.

When you empty the EPG I don't think pending recurring recordings are removed for some reason. Look at the guide after emptying the EPG and it'll be mostly empty except for recurring entries.

To clear them run 'pvrx2.exe -deletependingrecurring'. Then when you update the EPG they should return.

I use this in my daily EPG update routine because I noticed that even though I was doing a "complete reload" of the EPG I was getting duplicate entries in the guide (and duplicate recordings) which overlapped by 5 or 10 minutes when the schedule changed but it only affected recurring recordings. One channel here seems to change their schedules showtimes at least once a week (sometimes twice) so CSI every Saturday gets messed up!

[djtaylor]

I would suggest doing as bgowland said but with one extra step.

To clear them run 'pvrx2.exe -deletependingrecurring'. Then when you update the EPG they should return.

I use this in my daily EPG update routine because I noticed that even though I was doing a "complete reload" of the EPG I was getting duplicate entries in the guide (and duplicate recordings) which overlapped by 5 or 10 minutes when the schedule changed but it only affected recurring recordings. One channel here seems to change their schedules showtimes at least once a week (sometimes twice) so CSI every Saturday gets messed up!

Oh yes i'm well aware of the CSI issue!!

Having said that, although i'm still running 98.8, that problem seems to have gone away for me, haven't seen it do it for a long time now but thanks both for the ideas.

It's not something i'm looking forward to but i'll get around to doing it one day.

David.

[Nomad101]

I have noticed it seems to have improved recently. Radiotimes (or rather Channel 5) probably isn't making changes every few days like they used to but it may start again at any time. That's why I implemented that workaround as soon as I discovered the option (Sub listed the available commandline switches when he released 1.0.16).

I assume you use XmltvGUI and radiotimes for your listings? As part of my update process it also checks the file size of the new data.xml before using it and keeps the previous 7 days downloads just in case they start messing around and returning no data again!

I like things to run smoothly without having to intervene manually. Keeps the WAF high!!

Cheers
Tony