One channel - multiple sources

[Michał Sawicz <michal sawicz net>]

Hi there,

I once thought about this thing - you can have multiple sources of the
same channel, from different providers (DVB-S, DVB-T, DVB-C) and even
the same channel in SD and HD.

Such channels should not be visible by the end user - you should be able
to have a unique list of channels without really being aware of where
they come from, and the daemon should choose one of the sources for this
channel.

I think a way for this could be to have a tree of channels where only
the first level would be presented to the user. The 'parent' channel IMO
should be a virtual one so that you can move the child channels around
(changing priority) without messing the groups etc. I realize a 'tree'
of just two levels is a bit overkill, maybe a simple one-to-many
relationship would suffice, but it's required to keep the priorities of
the channels (i.e. DVB-S HD, DVB-T HD, DVB-S SD, DVB-T SD etc.).

The daemon would then try to find first available source to record /
stream this channel, without the user even noticing. It should also be
possible, though, to try and force using some other source (say, you
want to record something but want to make sure it's in HD), maybe even a
multiselection of sources (taking the above example into account -
select DVB-S HD and DVB-T HD for a certain recording). Here the
priorities would be used again. An empty list of preferred sources would
mean 'try all sources'. If no preferred source isn't available at a
given time (say, it's busy), the user should be notified about it, and
it should try recording from other sources.

I'd love to hear your opinion on this.

Cheers
-- 
Michał Sawicz <michal sawicz net>