Hang when waking up for a recording (1 Viewer)

[RobNorthcott]

MediaPortal Version: 1.0.2
MediaPortal Skin: Blue3 Wide
Windows Version: XP Home SP3
CPU Type: AMD Athlon 64 3200+
HDD: Western Digital 750GB "Green" SATA
Memory: 2GB DDR2
Motherboard: MSI K9N6SGM-V (micro ATX, nForce chipset)
Video Card: Gigabyte ATI HD4550 Passive, PCIe
Video Card Driver: 8.12
Sound Card: On-board
Sound Card AC3:
Sound Card Driver:
1. TV Card: Hauppauge HVR3000
1. TV Card Type: Hybrid DVB-S, DVB-T, Analogue
1. TV Card Driver:
2. TV Card:
2. TV Card Type:
2. TV Card Driver:
3. TV Card:
3. TV Card Type:
3. TV Card Driver:
4. TV Card:
4. TV Card Type:
4. TV Card Driver:
MPEG2 Video Codec: PowerDVD 7
MPEG2 Audio Codec: MPA
h.264 Video Codec:
Satelite/CableTV Provider: Astra 28.2E + Eurobird 28.5E
HTPC Case: Antec Fusion (silver, with VFD)
Cooling: 2x120mm case fans, 90mm Noctua on CPU
Power Supply: Antec 430W
Remote: Microsoft remote + keyboard
TV: Samsung 26" LCD
TV - HTPC Connection: VGA Sub-D (1360x768)

My system has suddenly got very unreliable for scheduled recordings, and AFAIK nothing has changed since it was working. Windows updates are off, no software (I don't think) or hardware has been installed. Recordings used to work pretty much 100% - the odd one failed, but it was very rare. Then suddenly almost all are failing. Sometimes it works, but I'd say 90% of the time the machine wakes up then just freezes on the MP home screen and has to be rebooted.

I'm not sure if it's freezing on wakeup or when it tries to start the recording. It's always fine if I wake it up manually with the remote to watch something. Once when it woke up for a recording I moved the cursor up and down the menu a bit to see if it was still responding (which it was), and the recording then worked OK - but it may have done anyway.

I wondered if it could be a weak signal or something (if the dish had moved in the wind), but I checked my dish alignment last night and it seems as good as it can be. The log seems to be pretty empty around the time of the failed recording, as if the machine had hung almost immediately after wakeup, but I'm not quite sure about that.

So I'm posting the logs here in the hope somebody might spot something I've missed
Any ideas?

The only thing I can think of that MAY have changed is that I did a backup recently, and that would have reset the archive flags of all the files (including all of MP and its recordings etc), but I don't see how that could matter.

The last failed recording in the attached log was 9pm (21:00)

Rob

 

[RobNorthcott]

Possibly nothing to do with recording...

I've been doing some more testing on this problem and I'm now starting to suspect the EPG grabbing rather than recording. My computer has just hung while just sitting there doing nothing (on MP home screen). The EPG log goes right up to the time it crashed, then just stops. Logs attached. I've turned off the EPG "grab while idle" for now to see if that cures the problem. Could it be that I just have bad reception on the EPG channel?

Rob

 

[RobNorthcott]

Bummer - still hanging even with idle EPG grabbing disabled. Logs attached again. "No translation found for id 14001" seems to come up a lot around the times it's hanging...

Rob

 

[RobNorthcott]

Bump!
Still doing it. I've disabled a couple of plugins I don't really use just in case (AudioScrobbler and MyPrograms, but they've been on there for ages), but still the same problem. Sometimes MP hangs but the recording still works in the background (but then machine has to be rebooted before anything else will work). Sometimes the whole machine locks up without doing the recording at all.

Does nobody have any ideas? Otherwise I think I'll just start again and install new MP - but I don't know why it's suddenly started doing this after ages of working fine. Could a corrupt SQL table cause these sort of symptoms? WAF is plummeting

Rob

 

[RobNorthcott]

OK, this is looking even weirder now. Seems like it's not just scheduled recordings that are the problem. Last night it hung completely (had to reset the machine) ten minutes into a manually started recording. From watching full-screen live TV, I pressed record, selected "current programme", returned to home screen and stopped live TV. When I came back in an hour the clock had stopped ten minutes after I'd started the recording. Grrr.

It's not that the machine is generally unstable because it never hangs while watching live TV or doing anything else - seems to be just recording it doesn't like. Really annoying, because it was working utterly reliably until a few weeks ago.

I wonder what's changed to make it suddenly become so bad...

Could a bad signal do this? I've had a bit of corruption recently while watching live TV, but nothing really bad - certainly not enough to crash MP. Could the recording bit of MP be more sensitive to bad signal (if that's what it is) than the live TV bit? As far as I was aware, making a recording is pretty much just half of watching live - doesn't it always write the ts file, then play it straight back again if you're watching live? Why should recordings hang when live TV is stable?

Rob

 

[RobNorthcott]

I think I've finally got to the bottom of this. Looks like it was a hardware problem, which would explain why it was getting worse when I thought nothing on the system had changed. The hard drive was dying - became obvious when it got worse. That explains why live TV was fine (uses a USB flash stick for timeshifting) and recordings failed. It started to get to the point where writing anything to the drive would hang the machine. ChkDsk wouldn't complete, nor would the official WD drive checker.

I reinstalled everything on another drive yesterday and it all seems much happier - even made a recording last night.

Now I've just got to hope it was the drive that was the problem, not the controller. But so far it looks good

Rob