I found another thing in the "little" video OSD (both in movpics and TV-S) when backskip for example, a "0", please, take a look at the green rectangle :
Yes
The lower one is just for info, the right one in the menu bar is a button, hover over it and you see detailded information in a window above the OSD
What I mean (it's your choice, I don't want to interfere) is, maybe the left one could be with "rec" label (because in TV-S, we don't have the red hat) and, the right one could be the "number of instant recording channels".
I understand why you are confused.
For "red had", please follow the yellow rectangle.
The problem is sometimes, the "red hat" come after waiting 5 minutes (this is defined by code in the TV plugin and, it's not stupid to save ressources avoiding too much communications between TV server and client(s)).
I saw that the OSD info is available faster (maybe because of the AJS's plugin manage it more often).
That's why I proposed you to change "a bit" the display of that (but, we will be more dependant of the plugin, it should be integrated inside natively in MP, IMHO).