I've got one PCI DVB device and two USB DVB devices. Sometimes vdr would only find one device, even though the others seemed to be working OK. I've now tracked down why.
vdr starts with /dev/dvb/adapterX/frontend0 where X = 0, increments X until it can't access the device, and then stops looking. This is probably the right way to do this but occasionally, I end up with the following devices:
/dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend0 /dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend2 /dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend3
I have yet to work out what causes this but I'm pretty sure it has to do with the USB driver and hotplug which somehow manages to load and unload the USB drivers several times in succession! Unplugging the USB devices and rebooting sorts them back to how they should be, i.e. 0-2 but it's a pain if I don't notice and I end up with lots of timer conflicts because only one device has been found.
Obviously, this is a broken driver issue and vdr isn't really at fault but is it worth allowing for a situation where a device may be 'missing' in the sequence? Is there any simple way of determining how many devices have been discovered, apart from looking in the log output, e.g. could this info be added to the STAT SVDRP command or similar?
I doubt this is a common issue and I'm not really after a fix: just thought others might find the info useful!
:)
Cheers,
Laz