[LastCoder]

Hi folks,

atm I'm running a single seat setup with one DVB-S2 tuner. Anytime soon I plan to build a real tv server with at least two or three DVB-S2 tuners .. I know that tvheadend supports more than one tuner; I'm more interested in how will tvheadend & xbmc handle multiple tuners in daily use. Will tvheadend detect which channels are identical and "group" them to one "virtual" channel ? Or will I have as much channels as tuners, so for example 3 times CNN ? And what happens if I mix different broadcasting tuners - for example one DVB-S, DVB-T and DVB-C ?

How will it be handled if I start a recording and watching another channel - is that transparent / in background in a way, the user - for example the wife ;-) - won't notice that ?

Thanks for enlightment ;-)

LastCoder

[Jönke]

When you add one more tuner in tvh you map the services that belong to that tuner to the same channels as your first tuner. Now you can stream and record from two muxes at the same time. In xbmc you will see no difference.

[Prof Yaffle]

I think tvh uses the declared service name to identify which channels are duplicates - it then joins them into a single virtual channel which can pull from any tuner. So, select that channel, and you'll get it from whatever tuner can provide it.

Where it fails is where the names aren't exactly the same, e.g. I get BBC TWO from DVB-T and BBC 2 from DVB-S - similarly, Pick TV and PICK TV are different. Obviously, any regional variations also fall foul of this, so BBC 1 West Midlands is different from BBC 1 South West, BBC 1 Wales, BBC ONE and every other variation of the same theme. This is as it should be, though, as each UK regional channel has its own EPG data because they may show different programmes from time to time (I don't know how it works in Germany and elsewhere, I presume it's the same). At least using multiple DVB-S tuners (as you plan to) would minimise this, since they'd see identical channel lists - you're more likely to get duplicates when mixing -S and -T.

The good news is that it's easy to merge channels by hand through the web interface, so you can remove duplicates if you wish.

[LastCoder]

thanks ! that sounds really promising -- and the TVH-way - very easy to manage ! tvh rockz ;-)

[odoll]

sorry for coming back to this old thread.

I had some bad experience during a test mixing dvb-t and dvb-s2, not because of diffent "service names", but because the adapters weren't assigned in the same order after reboot.

One time dvb-t was /dev/devb/adapter0 and dvb-s2 1, and the next time the other way around.

I'm planning to move off a SheevaPlug (Debian Jessy) with a dvb-s2 to an Raspberry Pi B+ with OpenELEC (XBMC switched off). Can I avoid this behaviour? I guess having two (or) more adapters of the same type (e.g. dvb-s2), even they are different brands, wouldn't harm, as long all are linked to the same dish / satellite?