I would love to have a feature where mythcommflag can be set to do any combination of the following:

avoid recordings
avoid tv or playback

That is to say, I would not have to tell mythcommflag when to start or what time range to use. It would itself check my schedule of scheduled recordings and run in the times when nothing is recording and/or nothing is playing back. This is nicer for slower machines that produce jerky video when mythcommflag runs during a recording or playback. A variation would be to set the nice level based on what else is happening at the same time. So very nice when recording or playback is happening, to very aggressive when no recording or playback is happening. Then the user doesn't have to give mythcommflag one range of time to work in. It would simply be opportunistic and do as much work as it can as early as it can subject to these constraints. Does this feature exist, or is it easy to implement?

I have this problem because I'm using a slow CPU with a PVR350, and it seems to give choppy video when mythcommflag runs during a recording (the hard disk pounds heavily more than if I"m only recording). Mythcommflag being nice (nice 17) is not enough to ensure that the video doesn't get choppy. What can I do?