[vdr] Re: Card Handling

[Usenet-372114@zocki.toppoint.de (Rainer Zocholl)]

Klaus.Schmidinger@cadsoft.de(Klaus Schmidinger)  02.01.02 16:13

Once upon a time Klaus Schmidinger shaped the electrons to say...

>Rainer Zocholl wrote:
>>
>> fspitzb@spitzberg.de(Falk Spitzberg)  02.01.02 13:20
>>
>> Once upon a time Falk Spitzberg shaped the electrons to say...
>>
>>>Klaus Schmidinger wrote:
>>
>>>>Falk Spitzberg wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>Hi,
>>>>>
>>>>>this saturday, I ran into an interesting situation. I have twi
>>>>>DVB-S cards in my VDR system, that where connected to different
>>>>>outlets. 
>>>>>Due to heavy snowfall the signal was too low to receive
>>>>>anything on the primary card. 
>>>>>The secondary card worked fine (obviously better connection), 
>>>>>but due to the tuning problem on the primary card, VDR kept 
>>>>>restarting until I was able to switch to an encrypted channel 
>>>>>where the secondary card is needed.
>>>>>
>>>>>Would it be posible to keep VDR running as long as there is ONE
>>>>>working card? A warning that card X is not working would be nice
>>>>>too.
>>>>
>>>>VDR only restarts if it NEEDS to use that card.
>>>>
>>
>>>Cannot be true. In my situation the free to air channels are
>>>configured to use card 0, which means any available card. The
>>>secondary card was available so VDR could use it with transfer mode
>>>like the encrypted channels.
>>
>> May i assume:
>>
>> [F1] VDR tries to sample "EPG" on the unused cards.
>>
>> But the "watch dog" does not know what asked for the tuning,
>> it just saw: "Timeout because no sync"
>>

>If there is more than one DVB card, VDR does NOT use 
>the primary card for EPG scanning. 

I understood Falk (wrong) the way that his primary cards worked and
only the second card had a problem. (I reformated his text
a little to make it clearer now.)


>The "emergency exit" due to a sequence of failed
>channel switchings is ONLY done if those switchings are done on the
>PRIMARY DVB card. Hence the EPG scan will NOT interrupt an ongoing
>recording. 

Ok, that means that EPG-sampling is not the cause for
the reset. 


Hm, the first recording would be done on the second card.
If the primary card fails the recording would be broken too.

What will happen if the second recording (on the primary card(*))
continues and the first recording recording stops?
EPG will start switching, or?

(*)I think a 2 card system is the "typical" system as long as
the cards are so expensive. With 3 or 4 Cards no one will
ever run into such a problem. At least it is not very likely.



>At least that's the way it was meant to be...

I see delimemma.
Best it would be if no watchdog would be required at all :-)
Or if the software could see the antenna signal amplitude:
If zero antenna signal, a reset of the boards would not help much.
Or if it could reset only the card which failed.