Calling all MP New Zealanders (Both of you!!) (3 Viewers)

[rlevis]

I like to post TV Server issues here before a formal report in case it's a known problem. I've always had the occasional issue where a recorded program may stop part way through as if it's at the end. The TV Guide shows say 1 hour long, but starting the program and pausing it shows say 30 minutes to the end, and that's where it stops. I can play the .ts file in VLC and it plays past this point to the end and appears to have some minor corruption or perhaps a signal reception issue for a second.

As you can imagine, it's caused some 4 letter words to be uttered when this happens.

MM, would you be interested in debugging this? I don't have a program recorded with the issue now as I didn't think of reporting it when it occurred yesterday and deleted it. I may get 2 or 3 programs like this a month.

 

[kiwijunglist]

Tried different h264 and audio codecs under the tv tab? Which ones does it fail with? Maybe you need a more robust h264 codec.

 

[mm1352000]

MM, would you be interested in debugging this?

That kind of problem is outside my area of expertise.

As you say, it is probably caused by a period of bad signal strength/quality that throws out TsReader's duration calculation. If you fix your signal quality then you fix the problem. If you can get an example recording then @Owlsroost may be able to try to improve the robustness of the duration calculation.

 

[rlevis]

This has happened on both satellite (90cm dish) and terrestrial channels, both HD. Signal strength excellent on both with Signal Quality at 100%. so not sure how it's reception issues but anyway.

I use LAV decoders for everything these days. It does seem to be something that only started 1 or 2 years ago which is likely when I switched everything to LAV. But I'm not sure that would make any difference to the duration calculation when pausing a program, or would it?

 

[mm1352000]

Signal strength excellent on both with Signal Quality at 100%. so not sure how it's reception issues but anyway.

Don't assume that the tuner signal statistics are trustworthy. They're unlikely to show transient bursty problems. Also, tuner drivers are inconsistent in the way they calculate/report their statistics. In other words, there's no guarantee that 0 is the lowest value and 100 is highest value.

If you're confident that your signal is okay then consider all the other possible causes of continuity errors (which is almost certainly what we'd find in the TsWriter log for the recordings, if you posted them). For example:

• do you have HDDs spinning up or down
• do you have other software that would be using the HDD that you're recording to
• are you recording to a NAS or network share

etc.

I use LAV decoders for everything these days. It does seem to be something that only started 1 or 2 years ago which is likely when I switched everything to LAV. But I'm not sure that would make any difference to the duration calculation when pausing a program, or would it?

Codecs have nothing to do with the duration calculation. Duration is entirely in the hands of TsReader. Having said that, just thinking now... I wonder if the durations shown in [for example] the recording list are from MediaInfo. In any case, when you actually play/pause a recording, TsReader is definitely responsible for that handling.

 

[rlevis]

It's a Windows 7 PC without a monitor in the office with TV Server only, no client. HDD is set to spin permanently. It's running some other software but nothing that uses the hard drive intensively. No anti-virus/anti-malware installed.

I did consider if it was fragmentation and did a defrag last time this happened a couple of weeks ago during the TV1 news, but this didn't help.

Yesterday when it occurred again, the program was still being recorded while I was watching it. Although it had been recording for 90 minutes, the program stopped playing around 35 minute mark. Tried starting again from the top and TSReader showed the program at 35 minutes, not 90 minutes and counting.

Perhaps TSReader can use some better method to calculate the duration? I forget now if VLC showed the correct or wrong duration, but it continued playing past the problem.

 

[mm1352000]

It's a Windows 7 PC...

We're at the point where log files and/or an example are required.

Perhaps TSReader can use some better method to calculate the duration?

Yes, I said that may be a possibility depending on Owlsroost... but ultimately it would be better to find and solve the problem at the source.

 

[kiwijunglist]

This has happened on both satellite (90cm dish) and terrestrial channels, both HD. Signal strength excellent on both with Signal Quality at 100%. so not sure how it's reception issues but anyway.

I use LAV decoders for everything these days. It does seem to be something that only started 1 or 2 years ago which is likely when I switched everything to LAV. But I'm not sure that would make any difference to the duration calculation when pausing a program, or would it?

your main issue is not that the time is incorrect, it's that playback dies presumably around the point of an error, and that when you play the recording in VLC it plays past the error without issue. You should try with a different codec for audio / video. Some of the codecs definitely handle errors better than others. From memory I think MS codec is pretty good with h264 errors.

 

[mm1352000]

your main issue is not that the time is incorrect...

If TsReader calculates the time incorrectly, it will stop playing before the end of the file... regardless of which codec is in use.

 

[rlevis]

I'll be sure to grab logs and the the video file next time it happens. Could be tomorrow or a few weeks.