Attempting to "Fake" Recording Tuner Priority

[rampantredsfan]

For background here is my tuner set-up:

-2 tuner - OTA Card
-1 tuner - Hauppauge 1212 HD PVR (just recently added to the set-up)
-4 tuners - Ceton Infini TV4 (TWC cable card, plenty of protected content)

In a perfect world I would set the tuner priority differently for recordings vs. live TV watching in order to take advantage of the lack of copy protection on the OTA and Hauppauge (Recordings: OTA, Hauppauge, Ceton; Live: OTA, Ceton, Hauppauge), but I have done a lot of reading, including a good amount on The Green Button (thank you!) and it appears that it is not possible to set the priorities different for recording/live. Please correct me if I am wrong.

So, the work around that I'm trying to research is to "split" the Hauppauge card out in a way that when recording a show that is on a channel that is generally protected it will attempt to use the Hauppauge tuner first, and then move to the other tuners if the Hauppauge is busy. My question to the community: If a show is on 2 or more channels at the same time, and the recording is set to record on any channel, how does WMC choose one channel over the other(s)?

Thanks!

[stuartm]

You may hav already seen this but maybe it will help
Copied from a post elsewhere on TGB:

Tuner priority:
The order is top-to-bottom for live TV, and bottom-to-top for recorded TV...
but this is further broken down by tuner type. So, if you have both ATSC and
CableCARD tuners setup for the same channel and your ATSC channels are on top,
then it will work like this:

Live TV will use the ATSC tuners first, from top to bottom. Recorded TV will
use the ATSC tuners first, from bottom to top. If all of the ATSC tuners are
busy, then it will repeat the same scenario on your CableCARD tuners.

[redmed]

Go into the show guide. At the channel box (that shows the channel number and name) right click, then choose "edit channel" then choose "edit sources". You can then move tuners up or down on the priority list.

[rampantredsfan]

Thank you guys for your replies. Sorry it took a while to respond as I have been trying to get my 1212 working. I finally, reluctantly, went with DVBLink to get it to work. So to clarify my earlier statement: the 1212 is set up as a Satellite in WMC.

Stuartm:

Thank you for the information. I had read the top-to-bottom, bottom-to-top information on another thread, but my machine does not act that way between these two tuners. It seems to got top-to-bottom for both Live and Recordings. If I could get it to act exactly like your passage that would be absolutely perfect.

I found the thread that is the source of your information: http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums/vie ... f=5&t=7364. In this thread people talked about a registry key that controls this. It seems like some people's keys are different than others. Do you happen to have any information on this key?

Thanks a ton for your help!

[dmagerl]

The whole tuner priority thing is goofy. It may start using tuners from bottom to top for recordings and top to bottom for live tv, but if WMC's been running for any length of time, I find it no longer does that.

For example, it always seems to use the last tuner to tune in a channel when that same channel is tuned to again.. So if ch x was watched live, and it used tuner 1, then when you schedule a recording and tuner 1 was last used to watch a show, and has not been used since, then the recording will happen on tuner 1 instead of on a tuner from the bottom.

You can use 411-info on the remote to see where the tuners are parked. When not in use they dont go to a "un-tuned" state. They sit on the last station tuned and if that station is ever tuned again, whether for live or recorded tv, that is the tuner that is used.

I wont even get into the common problem where you're watching live TV with plenty of other idle tuners and WMC decides it wants to use that tuner, the one you're using for live tv, to do its recording and you get that "tuner in use, OK to change channel" pop up. This alone shows its not a strict bottom to top/top to bottom priority.

The only way I can think of to do what you want is to split the sources for each channel into cable tuner and OTA tuner, so you have double listings in the guide. Then set up two Favorite Lineups. Name one "Live TV" and the other "Record TV" and assign the appropriate tuners to each. When you watch live TV, use the Live TV favorite line up, when you want to schedule a recording, bring up the Record TV lineup.

Its a lot of work and is really klugey.