Well, my useless opinion, the software "ought" to be smart enough to handle it.
Instead of throwing the buffer away with a channel change, it should just be a one-hour (or two-hour, even better!) continuous buffer per tuner that keeps on going. It takes some amount of effort to reset and flush the buffers and start it over from the beginning of the file; just continuing to write to the same place in the buffer file "ought" to be easier.
If that were done, you would have the following new features they could brag about:
- able to rewind prior to any channel changes on the current tuner up to an hour (or two) back; i.e. "what was that interesting thing I saw 30 minutes ago before I changed the channel? oh yeah, there it is."
- A recorded event on a channel that experienced the problem discussed in this thread, where the HD channel faded and the receiver automagically switched to the SD channel, would still be a single event in the recordings list.
- If somebody accidentally changed the channel, you don't have to panic realizing you just lost the buffer. You just miss whatever happened while it was on the wrong channel and can still rewind if you want to.