That's not much use when, like us, you often record a whole series before watching the first episode, so that if it is any good, you don't have to keep waiting for the following week's. By the time the last episode of a six part series is broadcast, the first episodes have disappeared from iPlayer et al.
SteveW
You can and I do. But your own recording is much easier to skip through ads etc if you want to.
I've no interest in paying for additional TV like Amazon, etc.
+1 On the few Sony products that I've owed the UI can be best described as being unique and designed by someone who never has to use the equipment on a day to day basis.
The last sony products I owned were set top boxes. These had an excellent UI.
Its gone downhill since then. Their digital TVS are way worse.
Only two things at once? Pathetic! How about 11 things[1] at once? :-)
[1] Not that I'd normally need to record more than 3 things at once (a maximum of 6 during simultaneous "Padding Conflicts" when all three BBC channels of interest happen to be showing back to back programmes of equal interest).Admittedly, that was SD material I was recording with my work-a-day desktop computer using Kaffeine as the "PVR 'app'". I deliberately scheduled all 5 BBC channels on the Beeb's SD mux and another 5 or 6 from a commercial SD mux which, amongst other TV streams, carries Channel 4's broadcast stream.
I tried to include padding overlaps but, afaicr, I was only able to include one at the time I was testing the 'limits' of the "PVR app" and I'm happy to say I didn't discover any during that test. Quite frankly, ICBA to try a more extreme test than that until I've at least upgraded the twin tuner DVB-T PCI adapter to a twin tuner DVB-T2 PCIe card.
Nicely summarised! :-)
My Extrend ET10000 PVR with 4 tuners will handle 8 simultaneous recordings without problems.
I'd never need that. Based on what I've wanted to record over many many years. I don't see the point in recording something I'll never watch.
I can easily do four. But never ever have needed to record more than 3 - and that's rare too.
I really couldn't be bothered using a PC as the basis of a TV recorder. I don't have one in the living room. I can look at things from the PC on the TV - but it was something just tried out of interest then forgotten.
Have you ever used that function?
MY 43" LG does that.
How does a tuner handle 2 channels?
each multiplex carries 6-30 channels.
i.e. here I can receive 6 multiplexes for a total of over 120 channels.
Easily, as long as they use the same multiplex. Do keep up.
I should imagine quite easily if my experience with Kaffeine on a Linux box is anything to go by. Hell! even my ancient 12 yo Acer Aspire 3660 laptop with its pokey 1.6GHz clocked single core mobile Celeron cpu could manage 3 TV channels from a USB tuning stick even with padding overlaps due to scheduling a pair of back to back programmes on each TV channel (6 media files being written simultaneously to an IDE interfaced 250GB laptop HDD) - it only choked when attempting to record 4 TV channels at once *without* padding overlaps. USB2 can be a real CPU cycles stealing vampire if you don't have an obscenely powerful CPU to absorb such punishment[1].
Of course, an entry level desktop machine of recent vintage (say less than 6 or 7 years of age) should be able to do much better, even using USB2 DVB-T tuning sticks. Basically, every single TV channel going through each mux (anywhere from 6 to 8 or more channels) should be do- able until you hit another limit, if ever, of the desktop's system components.
Until discovering, quite by chance, that you *don't* need a tuner per channel being simultaneously recorded if the channels are in the same mux, I too used to believe in that myth of a tuner for each TV channel you wished to record simultaneously.
Prior to changing over from win2k to Linux Mint 17.1 just over two years ago, I had been dabbling with Ubuntu on an al fresco test rig for a year or three beforehand in anticipation of win2k being kicked aside for lack of hardware driver support on my next impending hardware upgrade. I'd been using this test rig as a scheduling conflict resolver making good use of a KWorld twin tuner DVB-T adapter I had planned on using in the win2k box until I'd discovered the complete lack of driver support for this venerable OS.
One day, a few months prior to the massive upgrade, I realised I had forgotten to properly enable *both* tuning modules in Kaffeine *after* successfully recording two different but conflicting TV programmes (both BBC channels). Somehow Kaffeine, in spite of having access to only a single tuner,had managed to record both TV programmes in a feat that was denied to windows based PVR software. If ever there was a "Killer App" to justify the move from windows to a Linux distro, Kaffeine was *it*! :-)
[1] The more adventurous of us who used to (or still) own Toppy and Humax PVRs will remember the piss poor performance of their USB interfaces by which to transfer recordings to a PC. In the case of the Humax PVR, it was so piss poor as to not work at all reliably without an add-on utility to effectively make it send the data twice (at half speed) so it could correct the errors.Even the more powerful Toppy (same reference design but obviously fitted with a more powerful cpu as evidenced by the faster and more reliable USB performance) was still excruciatingly slow compared to a regular entry level desktop machine of 15 years vintage.
The cpu horsepower on both of these machines (at least initially in the case of the Humax) was more than ample to the task of recording two TV channels to their hard disks and allow the user to watch either another TV channel live if it happened to be in either of the tuned muxes or else watch an earlier recording off disk. In spite of having CPUs more than up to their primary task, they were barely able to satisfy the demands of the USB2 interfaces they'd been cursed with.
Each terrestrial tuner tunes into a multi-channel MUX and then everything on the MUX can be recorded. My box has 2 terrestrial tuners and 2 satellite tuners. The satellite tuners work in a similar way.
I've tested it to 10 channels simultaneously (all SD)
The most I've used in anger is 5 recordings. With the ability to record so many channel back to back programs each with their pre and post padding times are recorded separately with no timing conflicts.
That describes Kaffeine to a T. :-)
I'm currently in the middle of testing a DVB-T2 upgrade on my alfresco test rig (more modern MoBo - the one pulled out of my current desktop machine just over two years ago after having completed the standard 5 year 'tour of duty' that its two predecessors had gone through).
Being essentially a Linux related task, I've been posting to the ucol news group for help and advice only to discover that I'm now being regarded as "An Expert" in this matter by the tone of a lot of the follow ups (Gulp!).
I've managed to select a good Linux supported DVBSky T982 PCIe dual DVB- T2 adapter, download and copy the firmware files into the /lib/firmware folder on a freshly installed Linux Mint 18.1 distro (Kaffeine 2.x.x PPAs aren't available for the older LM 17.1 setup on my desktop machine), figured out that *both* aerial sockets need to be fed from the aerial source in order to avoid odd surprises. The existing Kaffeine version (1.3.x) doesn't recognise T2 tuners, hence the OS and Kaffeine upgrade.
I've gotten as far as proving that I can schedule recordings from the HD epg in spite of the huffman coding issue scrambling the programme names and descriptions - the start and duration times aren't subject to this issue which is all that is essential to scheduling a recording from the epg list.
By using the channelname/date/time variables for Kaffeine to compose filenames from and consulting the broadcasters' web based TV schedules (or bleb.org) by which to pick the correct time slot and rename the recordings afterwards, I have myself a work-around solution until a suitable epg plug-in to overcome the coding issue becomes available.
I'm now tinkering with the alfresco test rig to decide whether it's going to be worth the trouble of blowing away a perfectly good LM17.1 KDE desktop setup in favour of the LM18.1 KDE one which needs some serious work to fettle it into something less objectionable than the default.
When I started this T2 upgrade, I hadn't realised quite what I was letting myself in for. :-(
So are these programs being recorded before decoding?
The box records the transport steam for each TV channel as broadcast including information such as sub-titles as is the case with all modern PVRs.
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