Comment 4 for bug 1175944

correction:
If the multiplex from the *affected (signal loss)* tuner was streamed somewhere.....

Well, the watchdog is really necessary.
The event loop gets stuck eventually when one of the tuners has poor signal (and perhaps when I attempt to watch it?).
So far it seems that increasing the watchdog timeout from 1s to 2s reduces the abort rate dramatically.
That is, of course, no actual solution and could prevent debugging attempts.