can i record tv and do other things? (1 Viewer)

[mepoes]

Hi everyone, im fairly new to media portal and im still working out how it all runs.
last night i was trying to record a TV show and i thought while that was recording i would watch a video on the hard drive. this seemed to cause the recording to fail.
My question is how does the recording process work. if im recording, does media portal need to stay in the TV section the whole time or can i do other things such as view photos etc.

 

[craigparris1]

Hi mepoes,

No, you don't need to stay on the TV screen for a recording to keep going. Once you start a recording (I'm assuming you were watching a channel, and then selected "Record Now"?) the actual recording is then handled by the TV-Service, so basically it runs in the background, so you can carry on doing other thing in MediaPortal.

Did it actually start recording at all, or did it cut out part way through the recording? MediaPortal has very good log files, so you would need to look through those and see if you can identify the problem (or alternatively upload them here and someone else may be able to identify it).

One possible issue could have been I/O contention on your hard drive, if you just have a single hard drive in the PC - then MediaPortal is fighting with itself for the disk to record AND play the video you were watching, as well as the programs and Windows running, etc. However, if it's a reasonably quick hard drive, or you have multiple drives, that shouldn't cause the recording to fail entirely.

Cheers,
Craig

 

[mepoes]

Thanks for the advice Craig. im at work currently so i cant check the log file right now but i will when i get home. I was recording to and playing back from a network drive over Wi-Fi so i may have been asking to much of the system. Ill do a test tonight and see if i can record directly to the HTPC HDD and watch somthing off the network drive or a usb device.

 

[Andrew H]

With HD formats using a Wi-Fi is always an iffy situation... recording locally is good. Another thing that comes to mind is MP will timeshift the current TV show (you have tuned) and it will allow PVR functionality (pause, rew/ff) within the buffer although that does NOT record the show. You must select Record NOW to write it to a HDD for future playback. You set all of these HDD folders in the TV-Server. MP does a great deal of stuff simultaneously and recording to a HDD is trivial! YES, you should be able to watch something else while recording although watch the Wi-Fi, and if your system is resourse stretched you could have issue streaming.

Do us all a favor and fill in the "My System" on this site so we can know how robust your system is!

 

[geoffw]

Gets even better ...create mutiple users under windows users...say HTPC and Admin, then go a google search for c'oncurrent users windows 7' or similar , install the 'patch', enable remote desktop and magic, you'll be able to login to your admin user and do stuff while your TV stays on HTPC user. Make sure you get the 64 bit version of your on x64.