Too many timers

[SteveC]

Hi,

I had a couple of Toppies over many years and used IceTV. When IceTV tried to set 3 clashing timers for my Toppy (with dual tuners) I would get a "failed timer creation" email from IceTV and Toppy would only have two timers setup. That was fine because then I could decided what to do as I knew there where too many timers. In fact, sometimes IceTV seemed to set a timer for the third show for a later repeat transmission of that show.

Now I have an IceBox with a single dual tuner but IceTV has set timers across three networks with overlapping times, ie, I got no email from IceTV so I only knew of the problem because I happened to be looking through timer list. I guess when the time comes, one of the shows will just fail to record and I don't know how I would be made aware of that.

Is there a way to be informed when there are more timers than tuners?

Thanks in advance.

Steve

[IanL-S]

Not sure where the setting is but I occasionally get messages about failure to set timer on IceBox due to conflicts. My IceTV IceBox has 4 tuners and my BYOB have either 4 or 5 tuners so it is a very unusual to have that happen.

The clash avoidance option (which also prevents multiple recording of the same episode) can minimise the problem.

Try using to TVHeadend web portal to see if the IceBox thinks it has more than two tuners - why it would do so I cannot imagin.

[SteveC]

Thanks Ian.

I've always had the following set in IceTV:
   Enable Timer Conflict Avoidance
   Notifying me of failed timer recordings on my recorder

Both the above seemed to work on my Toppy but not the IceBox.

The TVHeadend web portal shows only 2 tuners available.

From old failed timer creation emails from IceTV that I found, it seems Toppy was the one that detected the problem (ie timer conflict) at the time it tried to set a timer (ie when it was doing it's regular timer and guide updates from IceTV) and then informed IceTV at that time. Then IceTV sent out the "Notification of failed timer" email. Does that sound about right?

It seems the IceBox (both Kodi and TVHeadend) cannot detect conflicts like the Toppy could. :-(

Seems the only solution might be to get a second dual tuner. :-(

Thanks, Steve

[DeltaMikeCharlie]

This is a feature/limitation of TVHeadend.

When creating a timer on a Topfield PVR, the firmware would look ahead at the existing timers to predict conflicts and prevent the user from proceeding when a conflict is detected.  However, there was also a bug in this process that could miss timers that had been modified in a certain manner.  Topfield PVRs only had 2 physical tuners and therefore could only record from 2 networks simultaneously.

With TVH, it accepts all recording scheduling requests and only identifies and 'resolves' conflicts at recording time using a set of priorities.  TVH can also address all the tuners that the Linux OS can see, up to about 16, if I recall correctly.

I have written a Python script that can detect these conflicts and one day I plan to turn this into a Kodi addon that can alert the user as a new recording is scheduled that will result int a conflict.

The script takes into account the number of tuners, the muxes required, scheduled recordings and future 'timer' records (In TVH, 'timers' and 'scheduled recordings' are different).  The script can not take into account 'AutoRec' recordings until a match has been found and it becomes a scheduled recording.

[SteveC]

Hi DMC,

You're another name (along with Ian) I'm pretty sure I remember from the Toppy, TAPs and TEDs forums back in the day.

Thanks for the response. 99% of the time Toppy got it right, so I was happy about that. A pity it effectively died a few weeks ago. :-(

You got to love a "feature" that's a limitation, I guess.

I look forward to your addon and will definitely give it a go ... if I haven't just bitten the bullet in the mean time and bought another dual tuner. :-D

Thanks again and thanks again to Ian.

Steve

[MD]

Our Tuner Collision Avoidance feature, managed at our server end, is currently off-line but in our urgent to-do/fix list. Apologies but not enough hands available to get to it sooner.

[SteveC]

Ah ha. Ok, that's sort of good news 🥴, if you know what I mean. I'll wait for that to be fixed and see what happens.

Apology not required. Thanks for the news 👍