help. tv stops playing and wont restart (1 Viewer)

[desmond]

Hi all.ok my mediaportal had been running fine for a few months but yesterday started messing around. I noticed my ssd hard disk was almost full so i decided to delete some stuff and do a clean install of media portal 1.6 to take advantage of the new sql database. So i did that last night and now have 80 gb free. I write my recordings to an unraid server on my network and have a 8gb ram drive for my timeshift.

So i set everything up and reinstalled everything from scratch. Im in the uk and have 3 freeview t2 recievers and 2 s2 freesat recievers. It takes a while getting all the channels scanned and combined but i have that done. I left live tv running last night and it was froze this morning. I restarted the pc and left it running all day. It was still ok when i got home after work. Tonight it has locked up again and mediaportal is reporting no audio or video detected. I restarted the tv service and it made no change so i have attached the logs.

Im really lost with this one guys. Cheers Des[DOUBLEPOST=1395952903][/DOUBLEPOST]and another log in debug mode...[DOUBLEPOST=1395953702][/DOUBLEPOST]and log from after a restart of pc. TV played for a short time then froze. The tuning details tab said signal went from 90% to about 5%??[DOUBLEPOST=1395954087][/DOUBLEPOST]So I have tried disabling one part of the s2 receiver card and changed tuner priority so another card, a t2 card is used first to see what happens.

 

[mm1352000]

I suspect your timeshift configuration is messed up:

[2014-03-27 20:39:33,632] [9906168] [17c0] - MultiFileWriter: fail to create buffer file
[2014-03-27 20:39:33,632] [9906168] [17c0] - Recorder: TIMESHIFT failed to open filename:G:\Temp\live3-0.ts.tsbuffer 1392

Do you have a G:\Temp directory, and is the user running the TV service process (tends to be a local system account) allowed to write to that directory?
Is the drive full or close to it?

 

[desmond]

And here is another log with the same issue on a t2 card. g:\temp is a directory on my ram drive and after the last crash there is 6.8GB free. I have this pc and another client connected with mediaportal though crashes happen with just this one machine running or both. I have configured the timeshare file with 16 files min and max of 245mb size as per the setup gude on here for 8 gb ram drive.

Could i have faulty ram?

 

[mm1352000]

...after the last crash...

I'm not seeing any crashes.

The other thing I should note (in case you're not aware) is that you have disabled one of your S2 tuners, so actually TV Server is only using 1 x S2 and 3 x T2. Further, 4 HD is only linked to two of your T2 tuners. In other words, when you try to tune 4 HD TV Server only tries three of your tuners rather than all five.

g:\temp is a directory on my ram drive
...
Could i have faulty ram?

I don't know if you have faulty RAM. All I can see is that TsWriter is unable to create files.
How about switching to a standard hard drive for timeshifting to confirm whether the problem is tied to the RAM disk?

[edit: The other thing I'd do is stop the TV service and manually delete all files on the RAM disk. That might help.]

 

[desmond]

Thanks for the help. Sorry crash was the wrong term I should of said freeze. Yes I disabled that s2 receiver to rule it out from causing the problem, but I'm getting it on the t2 receiver too.

It looks like something weird is also wrong with the channel mappings. When I ran the scan on all the t2 cards I selected the same options with the same transmitter etc, but I noticed Mediaportal seemed to scan different transponders on each receiver. At least the start and end transponders were different frequencies. That could explain why one card doesn't have this channel. What's going on there?

I have been running memtest86 now overnight and will let it run all day to see of the ram looks OK. No error yet. I have a 250gb drive that I could fit to this server and set the share file up to use it. I just feel that using my ssd may cause it to wear out? Maybe I'm over caution with that?

Thanks for all advice. I'm sure this is crackable, but with the waf on your back things get frustrating quick lol

 

[desmond]

Ok an update. I ran Memtest86 for 16 hours with no errors recorded. So I turned off the ram drive and set the time shift up to use my ssd for a test. I'm watching TV at the moment so will see if it freezes again.

My other issue with the TV channels not being mapped on all receivers has taken 3 hours of my time. So I found that the database is slightly incorrect for my local transmitter and I found how and were to modify. It's a learning process! So now I can pick up more channels on 2 of my t2 receivers, 83 in total. But one half of my Tbs 5280 only found 27 channels despite my best efforts. I tried different aerial cables etc and still it just refuses to find any more than that? Signal strength and quality is registered as 85% plus on the good receivers and on my normal tv so I don't think it's related to that. And also as it shares a cable etc with its twin in the same box that works great I think I have a hardware issue there.

Anyhow I will keep you updated about the freezing issue. Is using my ssd for time shifting going to kill it in short order? Cheers des.

 

[desmond]

Ok i left the tv playing at around midnight and went to bed. When i checked today at 13.00 ish the tv had frozen but i was able to restart it by pressing stop and going back into the tv guide and selecting a channel. This is while using my ssd as a timeshift buffer and ram drive disabled. Here are the logs. Cheers des

 

[mm1352000]

Okay, let me see if I've got this right. It looks like you left a10-PC timeshifting on Channel 4 HD. Am I right?

It took a bit of figuring out due to all the schedules (and duplicate schedules) that recorded during that time, but as far as I can see TV Server has not intentionally stopped timeshifting for that tuner. Because it wasn't a recording we have no way of telling when the timeshifting froze, but I'd wager that loading one of the two TBS tuners for the overnight recordings caused this. It's a problem I've seen occur in the past. The only way around it is to preload all the tuners.

I note that all your recordings on Dave seem to be duplicating. Might want to check that out.

[edit: To be clear though, what you're seeing here is totally different to what you were seeing when using the RAM disk. That was a different problem.]

 

[desmond]

Thanks for sticking with me on this! Yes I left the a10 - pc time shifting and it had stopped by the next day when I checked but it hadn't froze like the last time when I used the ram drive. TV could be started easily by picking a channel from the guide.

So it does look like that issue was down to some weird ram drive issue which is odd as the ram drive had been working well for months before the reinstall. I intend trying a different ram drive program in the future once stability is confirmed for a few days more using my ssd. The ram drive programme I was using was supplied by asrock the motherboard manufacturer and came supplied with the bios software.

OK so you say that there are multiple duplicate recordings on dave channel. What could cause this? I do have a schedule setup to record a few series on that channel every time they are on, but are you saying it's trying to record the same programme in parallel with multiple recievers ?

I am now using Web epg to get my epg data were before I used xmltv guide to do this. Could this be the cause as I find the guide less well populated now. Would it be easiest to delete all the channels on all cards and rescan them and setup the combinations and epg again using xmltv. If so how is it best to delete all channels and start again?

Cheers des.

 

[mm1352000]

OK so you say that there are multiple duplicate recordings on dave channel. What could cause this? I do have a schedule setup to record a few series on that channel every time they are on, but are you saying it's trying to record the same programme in parallel with multiple recievers ?

Too many questions...
Example.

[2014-03-29 10:53:02,635] [Log ] [scheduler thread] [INFO ] - Scheduler: Time to record Dave 10:53-11:30 Rocket City Rednecks
[2014-03-29 11:23:04,658] [Log ] [scheduler thread] [INFO ] - Scheduler: Time to record Dave 11:23-12:00 Rocket City Rednecks

[2014-03-29 11:53:06,660] [Log ] [scheduler thread] [INFO ] - Scheduler: Time to record Dave 11:53-12:30 Lizard Lick Towing
[2014-03-29 12:23:08,601] [Log ] [scheduler thread] [INFO ] - Scheduler: Time to record Dave 12:23-13:00 Lizard Lick Towing

So unless Dave has each programme scheduled twice in a row...?
Please keep in mind I'm from NZ so have no idea what the Dave guide patterns might be. It just seemed odd to me is all.