[confirm] MP locks up on tuning a weak TV Channel (1 Viewer)

[doveman]

I've tested again and now Mux B channels still show Strength 30 but the Quality is alternating between 20 and 0 and at the same time locked/unlocked.

So it seems my reception of this Mux drops in the evenings for some reason. I could ask the landlord to check the aerial, but I'm not sure if a badly setup aerial would receive all the muxes OK except for Mux B, so that might be a waste of time.

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

I would say the aerial is a problem, previous house had 2 aerials in 3 years, 1st worked perfectly for 18 months and then got constant breakup of signal, seems the aerial was not corrosion proof , amazingly the next fitter who came along said "who fitted that aerial, they are crap and will not do the job", sadly my memory was better than his, because it was the same guy.

Would defintely pass this back to the landlord, chances are it affects all his tenants, so in his interst to keep them happy

 

[doveman]

The problem with weak signal handling gets worse.

I scheduled two recordings both starting at 9pm and one of them on BBC4 (yeah I know! It looked interesting and I didn't notice what channel it was on, I must remove it from my channel list now to avoid doing this in future).

Anyway, I was watching the recording on BBC (from the live point), when it stopped working and then MP said it had lost connection to the TVService.

I loaded TV Server config and found that the service had actually stopped. I restarted it and after a while the recordings restarted and shortly after that, the TVService stopped again. I've restarted it again and now only the BBC1 recording is in progress, although I haven't deleted the BBC4 one yet, so I'd better do that in case it starts at some point and causes the TVService to stop again. I closed MP after the TVService stopped the first time, so all this testing was done just with TV Server config.

So, not only will MP lockup if I try and tune into a weak signal, the TVService will actually stop, taking down all recordings, if I try and record from a weak signal channel.

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

TVServer error logs show the failure, whats causing it unknown by me, looks like tvsevice just throws a wobbler at epg scheduled recording, should handle weak signal without crashing

2010-04-21 21:06:05.593750 [scheduler thread(9)]: dvb: LockedInOnSignal could not lock onto channel - no signal or bad signal

You can see how bad the reception is by looking at all your tuning lcn's ie 10000 instead of 9 (BBC4), so even when you did your first tune, it did not pick up all the transmitter data.

 

[doveman]

It did actually record for a few seconds the first time and about a minute the second, but as to be expected the results aren't pretty. Well, actually if you like a screen full of coloured blocks it's quite nice!

As you say, it looks like TVService can't handle being told it's meant to be recording a channel with such a poor signal and shuts down, as opposed to when it's just trying to play it live, where MP locks up but TVService survives.

 

[doveman]

I did it again!

Was watching BBC2, which has a good signal, and scheduled a recording on Sky3 (which doesn't, level 42 quality 20!).

Around the time the recording started (about 03:38), the LiveTV picture froze and audio stopped. MP became quite unresponsive but I eventually managed to stop LiveTV. Shortly after that I got a "Connection to TV service lost" message and loading TV Service config alerted me that the service was not running.

The strange thing is, since I've re-started the service the recording has resumed and is working OK, although I expect it won't be watchable. So it seems whatever is causing the TVService to shut down when the channel has a weak signal is more to do with MP than TVService, so that even if another channel with good signal is currently playing, the service stops when another channel with weak signal is recorded. Then again, when the recording started whilst I was watching another channel, the recording would probably have been on Tuner2, which seems to have slightly worse reception than Tuner1, whilst with MP dormant it's recording on Tuner1, which might explain why it crashed then and isn't now.

Actually, I just completely closed MP (it was sitting on the Guide page) and when I looked at TV Server config again, I noticed that the service had stopped again. I can't be sure but looking at the logs it seems this may have happened when I closed MP at 03:57. I've added TsWriter-2010-05-03.Log to the zip, because this reflects the period that the recording was being made after MP lost connection to the service and was sitting on the Guide page.

Hope some of this helps you to "toughen up" MP/TVService