Warning before tuning a channel

I noticed the other night that when I tuned a channel to watch it live, Channels stopped recording a show without warning. I have a two tuner HD Homerun and it was recording two shows that were setup via passes as expected. So when I tuned a channel to watch it it (not realizing that it was recording two shows) it just stopped a recording and tuned the channel.

Would it be possible to warn the user before cancelling a recording? Or check to see if one of the current shows that's recording can be scheduled at a later date during a rerun.

FYI, I'm using an nvidia shield for viewing and a windows 10 computer as the server. Channels is by far the best TV app and I'm a very happy subscriber :slight_smile:

Thanks!

That's odd. The one time I ran out of tuners, which was while doing a test, and tried to fire up a client on one more channel, the app simply told me there were no tuners available.

@gasmonso What model of HDHomeRun do you have.

Knocking a tuner off to play back live TV is completely opposite of how Channels is modeled. As many people getting "Tuner Not Found" can attest lol.

It's weird to hear this behavior.

It's a Connect Duo. I figured this behavior wasn't by design. What is the behavior if you are watching a channel live and then you have two recordings scheduled in the imminent future? Does it display a warning?

OK, so the recordings hadn't actually started yet when you turned to a live TV show? If that's the case, then it's working as designed.

Here's how it works:

If both tuners are currently recording a show, and you tune to a live show: You get an error. You can't watch anything because the tuners are in use.

If you're watching something live on 1 tuner and 2 shows try to record: 1 show will record with the vacant tuner, and the second show will not record because the tuner is in use.

Yeah, that's completely different from "I tuned a channel to watch it live, Channels stopped recording a show," which suggests it had been recording when he tuned to a channel, and the DVR was kicked off the tuner.

Well it was very close to the scheduled recording times when I tuned the channel. I thought I had tuned in after they started, but it may have been a minute or two before they started.

But even if I did start live tv before the recordings I think it would be a good idea to warn the user that scheduled recordings are about to start and give the user a warning that it will not record one of the shows.

Would you agree?

The problem with doing that is that tuner(s), DVR(s) and streaming apps are fairly decoupled from one another. Even were that not so: All it would take to throw sand in the gears would be for somebody to acquire one of the tuners with a non-Channels client.

I suppose the DVR could "look ahead," see all the tuners are in use, and throw a warning at all the active Channels clients it can find... I imagine that would probably be a fair amount of coding work.

We’ve got plans to make it a little more user friendly in terms of notifying you that a recording is going to begin and tuners aren’t available.

But the only time we’ll do this is if you are currently watching live TV. We can’t prompt you beforehand, because of the reasons explained by @jseymour.

We’ll only deal with situations that we know we can control, like if you’re using a tuner in Channels and Channels DVR needs one to record.

@gasmonso Just an FYI, once the recording DOES start, it will highlightedin the guide as red, and when you pick it to watch, it will prompt you to pick watching the recording from the start, or tune in live (which would actually fail if you’re out of tuners, we should probably check before asking you, heh).

Personally, I would love a setting (or something) that would kick a live tv tuner to the curb in favor of a recording. I can't think of any circumstance where a live tv stream would have priority over a scheduled recording. At least not in this household.

Thanks, we’ll keep that in mind when we start working on this. That seems like a fine idea.

With a setting that makes it so that a recording always reclaims a tuner, it would pick a Channels device that’s watching live tv, stop the stream, and present a reason in the UI. It’s a bit aggressive, but as a setting in Channels DVR Server, it’ll be up to you whether to use this mode or not.

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... and for us 'tuner challenged' folks (having only 2 in this Connect Duo), that setting would REALLY come in handy... I just hate it when I have TWC on too long (for some reason) and 'Casablanca' didn't record... Seeing a message (or a black screen) take the place of TWC in favor of Casablanca would have made me weak in the knees with delight...

:wink:

That's basically what TiVo does, albeit without a setting to disable. Make sure they haven't somehow patented that.