Klaus Schmidinger wrote:

Because that "shifting" is not active (see cDevice::CanShift()).

Ok, this explains it.

As to why the recording started on the primary device, while there were budget cards free at the time, I guess you'll need to do some debugging in cDvbDevice::ProvidesChannel(). Here on my system

recordings

only use the primary device if all others are already in use.

Ok, I did, but in cDevice::GetDevice() first. As far as I can tell VDR considers all cards equal and selects the first one, which is the full card.

What I didn't mention earlier was that the full-card is not a primary device (as I'm using xine-plugin).

I could change the for-loop to check devices from last to first and it would fix this for me, but I guess it might be a good idea to make VDR select budget card over full card even when full-card is not a primary device.

Teemu