Multiple sources

[Sammy 739]

If I have, say, any combination of two or three of the following: HDHR Connect Quattro, HDHR Prime or an m3u stream and choose something to record or watch that is on one and not the other or potentially on two will Emby choose the right tuner?

 

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[Carlo 4331]

You could potentially have a channel on all three such as your local FOX, CBC, ABC, NBC channel.  In that case it would be available via ll three sources.

When you ACTUALLY schedule the recording it will use the channel from the listing of one of these tuners.  So at that point in time it's "committed" to that tuner.

 

If a stream or tuner isn't available on that "device" then you're hosed.  This is a problem in general and many people have asked for "merged" sources/channels between different devices specifically for this reason.  Emby will do merged channels on like devices.  For example when I was running Quantity 3 HDHomeRun Primes I had 9 of every channel and the recordings were setup again the group vs an individual device.

 

Where things get more confusing is when you setup a recording then manually change the channel to "All Channels" and the device it would have used has no tuners/streams available.

 

This is one of the biggest reasons some people use other "engines" for the recording such as Next PVR or TVHeadEnd.  With these other dedicated programs you can combine/merge the channels from different sources as well as set priority of devices.

 

Luke has said the "merge" functionality will be in a future update as well as better channel management in general.  Hopefully then Emby functionality will be very similar to what can at present only be done using 3rd party software.

 

Carlo

[Carlo 4331]

Sammy,

 

What I'd suggest is setup a recording using a specific device (ie Quattro) for a channel like CBS that you'll also have on your Prime.  When you setup the recording change the channel to "All Channels".

 

Now use up all the channels on the Quattro with other recordings or Live TV viewing to make sure it's not possible for the test recording to fire off on the Quattro.  Check and see if it was smart enough to roll over to use the CBS channel on the Prime since it will have the same listing in the EPG for the program.

 

Typically the OTA and cable will use different call sign/station IDs for these channels.  For example in the Phila area CBS OTA is "KYW-TV" while on Cable it's "KYWDT". 

 

Carlo

[Sammy 739]

Thanks Carlo! Never used NextPVR or TVHeadend before as I'm coming off WMC. I did try NextPVR years ago but didn't stick with it.

 

Maybe I will just eliminate duplicates in the Emby LiveTV setup or even in HDHR Web GUI Channel lists so no conflicts will exist and the correct tuners are preselected that way.

 

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[Carlo 4331]

When I'm running things strictly through Emby with a very similar setup to your I found:

1-Only use the Quatro for local channels.  I'd force this by remove all channels available OTA from my cable listing (non favorite).  This way ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CW, etc can only be played/recorded via the Quatro.

 

I figured I've got 4 tuners for OTA and only 3 tuners for Cable so I want to try and maximize the use of the Prime.  It's probably a lot more rare to have 4 recordings going from OTA then it would be to have 3 tuners in use from Cable so that was my thought.

 

This is the way my production Emby server is configured.  My dev/test machine is setup to use the same tuners and M3U files via Next PVR (or TVHeadEnd).  I'm also helping to test V5 which I'm excited about as it supports multiple M3U files.  Next PVR V4 does merging of different tuner channels really well except for the fact it only support 1 M3U source.  V5 supports multiple M3U sources but doesn't handle merging nearly as well or tuner priorities YET as it's still in development.

 

The "holy grail" I'm after is being able to have 1 or more OTA devices, 1 or more Cable devices with multiple M3U active.  I'm able to merge all channels together that are "like channels" and set a priority order to know what devices will get used FIRST for each channel and have it "fall back" to other devices/sources if needed.  All while supporting multiple M3U providers and their respective stream limits.