[bungee91]

I apologize if this has been asked before, I looked for any type of setting in the server and didn't find anything related.

Anyhow if I am watching channel 7 in live Tv and a recording on the same channel starts it kills the live Tv that I was watching. Then I just reselect live Tv on the same channel and it then grabs the next available tuner.

I have 6 tuners, so is there a way for the recording to start on another tuner since the one is currently in use?
This is on the same computer as the server software.
I understand that recording and watching the same thing is somewhat silly, but this event happens regularly with my viewing habits.

[scarecrow420]

This also happens frequently with my family viewing habits and it is the most annoying thing for me currently!

Unfortunately it's due to the way we interact with wmc, our "live streams" are actually recordings being remuxed and that means that wmc re-uses the tuner we have for a scheduled recording, rather than grabs a new one, since it doesn't want to record the same channel twice simultaneously.

It isn't easy to stop this, I tried to flag the tuner as exclusive but that crashes ServerWMC and locks up the tuner requiring a restart

the best idea I have so far is a work around to automate what you are doing anyway (re-request the live stream when the tuner is stolen)

[bungee91]

Well at least it's not me and just missing something..
The automating would work if it can be transparent, just unfortunate either way. If we could just switch to the recording automatically with a small delay that would be a good option also.

[scarecrow420]

It wouldnt be totally transparent because XBMC would have to re-analyse the new file and so on, but at least you wouldnt have to do anything. Switching to the recording is probably not worth it IMO since when you get to the end of the recording the playback would stop and also if you had paused or whatever, when the recording ended you would then jump to real time, whereas if we just started a new live stream you'd be able to view as long as you wanted (until the next scheduled recording interupts it, LOL). Potentially we could start a new live session if there are available tuners and if not, view the recording. Its not pretty though but it might be better than the current situation. The other annoying thing is at the moment I think when a tuner is stolen ServerWMC signals the XBMC client and it stops playback, but this happens even if the client was behind realtime and still had buffered content to watch. Ideally it shouldnt enact any "tuner has been stolen" logic/action until it reaches the end of the stream. I could be wrong on this point but basically I need to get some time to try and muck around with this stuff and see if I can come up with anything. It would definitely be so much better if we could grab a tuner in exclusive mode and thus prevent WMC from being able to take it but so far we havent found a way

[bungee91]

I see, and yeah you're right it would make more sense to grab another tuner instead of the recording.
Transparent isn't needed really, a loading, or buffering in XBMC when doing the switch over would be enough to give the user a heads up and not just think it froze or broke or something, then involving interaction.

If ServerWMC could have a condition to know the tuner has been dropped, then could it call upon that event and then load the next?
Would stopping the tuner yourself give the same event, and then cause an issue with it trying to reload again (basically can we tell it was stolen, vs the user stopping it?).
Basically what you are saying, just me talking out loud.

[scarecrow420]

Yeah we do know the difference between the tuner being stolen as it's required for a recording (you should see an XBMC notification pop up advising "Tuner is required for a recording" or something similar), vs when the user stops the stream themselves. So I think what I'm outlining should be possible, just need to get some time to play around with it