TVE Recording priority and number of "tuners"

I understand the notion of a DVR having a limit to how many "tuners" it has, so then that limits how many concurrent recordings (or viewing) of channels are supported. With TVE, there isn't a tuner, and so if I went and hit record for 10 shows that are all airing at the same time, what happens? I would guess that my Mac Mini is going to peak out at some point and not be able to keep up. I am just getting started with Channels DVR and will be adding my HDHomerun Quatro tomorrow, but am up and running with TVE already. So once the HDHR is installed, how many "tuners" will I then have with 4 real ones plus what I can do with TVE?

The only limits to TVE tuners are bandwidth related:

  • How many concurrent streams can your inbound internet connection handle – This will likely be the biggest bottleneck
  • How many concurrent streams can your DVR handle – This is about the network bandwidth of all of your internet-based TVE streams coming in to your DVR, all of your HDHomeRun streams coming in to your DVR, and all of the streams being served by your DVR to viewing clients; normally this isn't a problem, but if your home network is only 100Mbps—or mainly wireless—it could definitely be an issue
  • Your storage bandwidth – TVE streams need to hit your DVR's storage—even if only briefly—before being served to clients. Also, if your storage is a USB2 drive, it has a maximum bandwidth of 480Mbps, while many networks are 1Gbps, so your network may have the bandwidth the handle lots of internet-based TVE streams, your storage media may not

Everything is a trade-off. But if you break each leg of the journey your stream takes—whether from the internet (TVE) or broadcast (OTA)—into its components, you can better analyze how many streams you can handle.

I have gigabit fiber coming in, gigabit network in the house, and a Mac Mini with USB3 10TB external drive for storage. If I ask it to record 40 shows at the same time, and then try to watch a couple of them while still recording, what happens. If it is all bandwidth limited, then it seems like its going to try to do more than it may be able to do and just slow down and break. I assume recordings can't be interrupted, or they will be corrupt. Seems like there should be a way to set a limit on how many concurrent TVE streams it should try to schedule for recording so that it would then use the schedule and prioritize accordingly.

I am trying to mimic the record everything idea used by YTTV and Philo, so create passes for all the shows we watch set to record all.

For comparison, TVE streams are usually 2–5Mbps, OTA streams are usually 5–8Mbps. In my personal experience, I've had 6-8 concurrent recordings while viewing something live; my internet is 200Mbps down, all pertinent connections are GbE, my storage is an external 10TB USB3 drive (UMS, not UAS), and I have 283 passes/rules on my DVR. I have never experienced a bandwidth problem in my use.

I doubt you'll run into a situation where you're recording 40 things at once, but I still don't think you'll experience problems.

OK, sounds like we have somewhat similar situations. I would have thought the drive would be the bottleneck, but sounds like I'm over thinking it.

So Channels DVR will prioritize scheduled recordings on the HDHR channels, but not the TVE channels. It would be nice if they were in separate lists from a setting priorities standpoint I suppose. But I'll just pull the real HDHR priority passes to the top and not worry about the rest. My wife has a few shows that if they don't get recorded she gets testy about.

You can arrange your priorities however you like. I posted in a different thread about how the priorities work:

Passes are source agnostic usually, unless you've specified a particular channel number that's only available one source versus another. You can also arrange the priority of your passes/rules. Remember, a channel's favorite status takes precedence over the general priority list, unless a particular channel was specified in the pass/rule.