[confirm] Errors going from watching recording/timeshifting to LiveTV (1 Viewer)

[doveman]

I've noticed over the last few days that if I'm watching a recording (it may be only with recordings that are live/timeshifted) and it gets to the credits and I try and switch to watching another channel live, I get various errors such as "Insufficient disk space" and this happens repeatedly until eventually it works and I can watch live TV.

My timeshifting is on a 510MB RAMDisk and it's set to Min/Max 6 files of 70MB, which it tells me requires a minimum of 210MB and Drive Space Needed of 490MB.

 

[tourettes]

Try to reproduce the issue without using a RAM disk. TVE is known to fail in some cases to clean the existing TS files so the TS disk usage limits aren't obeyed.

Using RAM disk as TS destination is nothing else than a good source of trouble:

• It won't give any performance improvements on channel changes (unless you are using some 15 year old hard disk)
• It won't reduce the HD noise since lot of other disk activity (thumbnails, database etc.) are still done by. Also I consider any HTPC non-living room worthy if it makes any audible noise
• HDs are build to handle read/write request - no real difference between the lifespan of the disk

Should the TS buiffering be fixed to obey with the set limits. Sure, but it is on really low priority and not an easy one to fix. It would be better to refactor that whole TS file handling on both client and server side.

 

[doveman]

Thanks but I like using RAMDisk

It does reduce noise because when I'm watching TV, it's generally not writing thumbnails or anything else, so the only HDD noise would come from the Timeshifting buffer access. I'm a silent PC freak but HDDs are notoriously hard to silence without putting them in an enclosure like this http://www.silentpcreview.com/article245-page1.html (using a 2.5" HDD can help a lot though). Of course, whilst I'm watching TV that generally drowns out any noise from the HDD but there's sometimes quiet parts where it intrudes.

I'd rather not be constantly writing to the HDD whilst TV is on, which I'm sure must reduce it's lifespan but also because I use the PC for other stuff whilst TV is on, so if it has to keep moving the heads between the timeshifting files and the other files I'm accessing, that's going to have an impact on performance.

Anyway, I'll try reducing the number of buffers to 3 for a Drive Space Needed of 280MB and see if that leaves enough spare to avoid this error happening.