Let's take it easy. There are many stress test situations that may not be easy to handle.
To be clear where I start:
1) HDHomeRun is a device with 2 hardware ClearQAM tuners. 2 coax cables in (one each tuner), 1 ethernet cable out (to a PC, a router, whatever). Both tuners get presented anywhere on the network as available. As they become being used by clients (a player like VLC, an MC app) the drivers installed on each client PC dynamically allocates them, transparent to the user -> you make a request ('want to watch Letterman on CBS') you get whatever tuner is free, or the first of them if both are free. Or you get nothing if both tuners are already in use. (let me know if I need to document the 'nothing' better, can't say from the top of my mind if there's a message or not)
2) MC doesn't support QAM. This is an easy fix for HDHomeRun since it does QAM/ATSC remapping within its drivers. Pretty much you set up what would be the default app to use with it; instead of choosing a player like VLC one chooses the QAM/ATSC remap feature instead. Then whatever app knows only ATSC gets to use the tuners too. Works flawlessly with MC as far as channel detection and playback.
What I tried so far:
- dynamic allocation with 2 recordings with different (but concurrent) starting times on one (the same) machine. This works 100%. Tuners get picked up as needed all recordings are done.
- concurrency stress test with one HDHomeRun device (2 tuners). I programmed a first recording to start around 11:00 PM. A second, a third and a forth (of lengths varying between 30 min to 1 h) to start later, while the first is still being recorded. What happened:
a) there was no warning that there are more than 2 future recordings that overlap, hence they can't be recorded each completely since they are exceeding the number of tuners available (at present time, at future time, at any given time);
b) recording 1 began as planned, recoding 2 began as planned, recording 3 didn't begin at the indicated start time (no more tuners), recoding 4 didn't begin at indicated start time (still no available tuners), recording 2 ended and recording 3 began for whatever was left of it, recording 1 ended and recording 4 began, also for the time left for that specific program.
So the test ended with 2 complete recordings - the ones that started first and second, and with 2 incomplete ones, third and fourth, which started - obviously - when tuners became available.
One note to make is that I didn't change any priorities, all recordings had the same, default (medium) priority. On a future test I'll check what happens with diff. priorities. The recording mechanics are pretty obvious and I don't have a problem with them. My problem is that with the described setup there was no warning while programming the recordings or when some were supposed to start but couldn't.
So I'm curious if there is a warning mechanism in place, in which situations it works, if it works with a certain setup but not with HDHomeRun (after all I could probably buy a couple of USB tuners and hook 'em up; recording multiple channels at once is not something specific only to the device we're talking about).
Ben, you're welcome to add any thoughts or findings you got. With 4 tuners it's obviously less likely to run in a 'saturated' situation, but what can I say, I live for exceptions
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