Plugin: Tuner Preroll

[routerunner]

Since the day I replaced my old Hauppauges DVB-S2 tuners with two TBS 6984 tuners last year I had a singular issue whereby starting multiple recordings at the same time would eventually make fail the recording on the other tuner one by one (yellow icon followed by red icon).

After few days of investigation, I've finally discovered the reason of the fault, basically every time the SageTV server was restarted, any upcoming recording would force SageTV to perform the tuner network type (ATSC, DVB-C/T/S) discovery algorithm that would create enough delay on the current recording to cause the tuner to timeout because its buffer wasn't cleared fast enough by SageTV. When the network type for a particular tuner is found it will stay in memory until SageTV is restarted therefore making the subsequent tuning operation much faster, however until all tuners are used at least once (and therefore the network type identified) you could be hit by the issue and you always wondered why you were experiencing this random yellow icon than seemed to sort out by itself

This problem seems more frequent when you have more than four tuners in your system and with the TBS tuners being more susceptible than others, also I'm one of the few that switches off the SageTV server overnight and therefore I'm more subjected to the issue every day, which is not fun

Anyway to cut a long story short I came out with the idea of a plugin that would "preroll" one by one all my digital TV tuners at start-up, that way all the tuners will be correctly identified by SageTV and ready for the daily recording tasks.

If you ever experienced that weird sometimes random yellow icon after installing a plugin (which would inevitably restart your SageTV server), then this plugin might be for you, otherwise you're one of the lucky person that have a perfectly well balanced system whereby all the tuners are working harmoniously with each other without any issue whatsoever

Please note that if you have a TBS tuner in particular, but it could be valid for other tuners as well, make sure that the following properties are set for each tuner in your sage.properties file accordingly:

mmc/encoders/xxxxxxxxxxxxx/100/0/broadcast_standard=DVB-S
mmc/encoders/xxxxxxxxxxxxx/dshow_tv_type=DVB-S

Those settings, which represent the network type (possible values are ATSC, DVB-C, DVB-S or DVB-T), have the double effect of speeding up your tuning performance and making my life easier

Please find the plugin in the "General" tab under the name "Tuner Preroll".

Thanks
Eddy

[routerunner]

A new version (v1.0.1) is available to download:

• Fixes some tuners reporting an invalid signal strength value.

Please restart the SageTV server if not prompted to do so.

Thanks
Eddy

[routerunner]

A new version (v1.0.2) is available to download:

• New method, simpler, faster and reliable.

Please restart the SageTV server if not prompted to do so.

Thanks
Eddy