Not waking for all recordings (1 Viewer)

[jameson_uk]

TV-Server Version: RC4
MediaPortal Version: RC4
MediaPortal Skin: Blue3 Wide
Windows Version: XP-Pro
Motherboard: Asus P5KPL-VM
Video Card: ATI 3650
Video Card Driver: 8.8
1. TV Card: Pinnacle 7010ix
1. TV Card Type: Dual DVB-T / Dual DVB-S
1. TV Card Driver: Latest

I have been doing some testing as having problems with MP going into and coming out of S3 standby (which means I have missed recordings and this is not good for WAF)

Last night I set the PC to record
Bad Santa - Channel 5 - 21:00 - 21:55
Bad Santa - Channel 5 - 22:00 - 23:05 (5 mins of news in the middle)
4Music: 4play - 4Music - 00:45 - 01:00
The Real Hussle - BBC3 (?) - 01:40 - 02:10

PC went into standby at 20:01.
Woke up at 20:57 and recorded Bad Santa.
back to standby at 23:10
woke up at 00:41 and recorded 4Music: 4 Play
back to standby 01:09

it however never woke up around 01:40 to record The Real Hussle. it also did not wake up at 5am when it is scheduled to wake and grab EPG. When I got up this morning and got the PC to resume I was greeted with a black screen and had to close the MP client as I all I could see was the XP start bar (I have posted about this in the MP Client bug report and I had kind of solved this by ticking the restart on resume option but for some reason MP had not told itself to restart on resume this time)

Looking through the log I noticed

2008-12-11 19:33:14.203125 [MPMain]: AssignSchedulesToCard: schedule = The Real Hustle: High Stakes on 3 12/12/2008 01:40:00 - 12/12/2008 02:10:00  ID=0
...
2008-12-11 23:10:10.062500 [Powerscheduler Timer]: PowerScheduler: new next wakeup time 12/12/2008 00:42:00 found by ScheduledRecordingsHandler
...
2008-12-11 23:10:10.125000 [Powerscheduler Suspender]: PowerScheduler: Set wakeup timer to wakeup system in 90.83125 minutes
...
2008-12-11 23:10:11.921875 [PowerEventThread]: PowerScheduler: Set wakeup timer to wakeup system in 90.8015625 minutes
...
2008-12-12 01:06:09.656250 [Powerscheduler Timer]: PowerScheduler: new next wakeup time 12/12/2008 01:37:00 found by ScheduledRecordingsHandler
...
2008-12-12 01:06:09.656250 [Powerscheduler Timer]: PowerScheduler: System is unattended and idle - initiate suspend/hibernate
2008-12-12 01:06:09.656250 [Powerscheduler Timer]: PowerScheduler: Manual system suspend requested by 
2008-12-12 01:06:09.656250 [Powerscheduler Timer]: PowerScheduler: Entering shutdown Suspend ; forced: False -- kick off shutdown thread
2008-12-12 01:06:09.656250 [Powerscheduler Suspender]: PowerScheduler: Shutdown thread is running: Suspend, force: False
2008-12-12 01:06:09.656250 [Powerscheduler Suspender]: PowerScheduler: Informing handlers about UserShutdownNow
2008-12-12 01:09:34.968750 [PowerEventThread]: OnPowerEvent: PowerStatus: QuerySuspend
2008-12-12 01:09:34.968750 [PowerEventThread]: OnPowerEventHandler: PowerStatus: QuerySuspend

I am not sure if the ID=0 in the first line here is important but the main thing I noticed is that when the PC did successfully wake there are messages in the log about when it should wake up again but going into standby at 01:09 there is no mention of waking again.

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

xmltv reliability goes out the window at this time of year, you will find the date the missed recordings were set for ended in 2009, hence the huge time delay before a resume is required.

DVB-epg is the most reliable source upto the new year, damn typo's.

 

[jameson_uk]

DVB-epg is the most reliable source upto the new year, damn typo's.

I only use the DVB EPG ...

xmltv reliability goes out the window at this time of year, you will find the date the missed recordings were set for ended in 2009, hence the huge time delay before a resume is required.

Just read this again and I am not sure I follow. The delay before resume is required was showing as 90 mins (correct).

Also the PC did not wake to update EPG as it should have done at 5am which is independent of any EPG issues

also the log shows

2008-12-12 01:06:09.656250 [Powerscheduler Timer]: PowerScheduler: new next wakeup time 12/12/2008 01:37:00 found by ScheduledRecordingsHandler

which is when it should have woke but never did...

 

[ronilse]

Hi,
You should attach all logs collected with "MediaPortal Logs Collector" to your post.
Was all standby requests from MediaPortal (left @ home for x minutes)?

Regards
Roy

 

[jameson_uk]

You should attach all logs collected with "MediaPortal Logs Collector" to your post.

Ideally I would have done but with MP client going into standby I was left with one BAK file (above) which only contains details of one the last recording and one log file showing that I have turned on machine this morning.

Most of the other client logs have no BAK version so I was just left with lots of logs again showing that the machine was switched on this morning.

I can get you the event viewer details if you want but there was basically nothing in the event viewer (just telling me that powerscheduler had responded to power message and these tie in with what is in tv.log)

The other logs (EPG / VMR9 / error) has no entries for the period of time I am talking about

Was all standby requests from MediaPortal (left @ home for x minutes)?

Other than getting the machine to resume this morning all standby events were just by leaving client on home screen.

Only oddity was that I had a failure when trying to watch a video at around 22:10 and I closed MP client and then restarted it straight away (was still recording in background). I am not at home to check but I am fairly sure the logs for that failure have been overwritten (as above the MP client log has the current version and one BAK log from the last recording)

Let me know if you think any of the other logs would help and I will see if I can find them when I get home

 

[jameson_uk]

Ok today came back and machine was in standby. Brought machine out of standby and I was greeted by the same blue taskbar, black screen and MP window (stuck at not responding) as I always seem to have. Normally MP Client restarts after resume (I have the option ticked in client config) but when everything crashes it does not.

As soon as I end task on MP client then the machine goes into standby and I get the MS error reporting service (can't submit until I bring out of standby again)

Not sure if you can find anything in these logs but machine was meant to wake at 5am to grab EPG (which it did) and then go back to sleep (which it did) but as with other issues it does not appear that a time was set to wake again and MP Client was not set to restart on resume.

also the tv.log has a load of entries about NextWakeupTime values of 9999-12-31 23:59 ??? two of these are called dead#2 and dead#4???

 

[jameson_uk]

This is begining to be a deal clincher with using MP at all as missing recordings is big no no for WAF.

I don't believe I have a particularly odd setup (I have just installed RC4 Client and TV Services, MyTVSeries and ComSkip and nothing more running powerscheduler and comskip plugins). I don't think hardware setup is odd either (Asus P5KPL-VM mobo, Intel E4500 CPU, ATI 3650 GPU and Pinnacle 7010ix TV card).

I see others are having problems with S3 and S4 standby but there do not seem to be any bugs raised in Mantis for this??

Is there anything I can do to help narrow down whether this is a bug in MP or somewhere else?? (the machine does seem quite happy to go into and come out of S3 standby with VMC and when MP is running but I have not really tried either setup where the PC is waking itself)

I have tried the MCE Standby tool (even worse results when I set MP to close on standby and start on resume as just greeted with a completely blank screen and needed to start Live TV to get a picture; then everything was working)

I am happy to look at replacing hardware if it fixes the issues but I don't really want to start replacing bits for the sake of it...

Please please please someone help!!!!

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

What you need to do is split this up between TVServer failing to record and Mediaportal causing the system to lock up, usually caused by video driver failing to reinitialise after resume.

Test system without using MP, so only TVServer running, record 4-5 or more little news programs, also try making these use more than 1 tuner and see if they have been successfully recorded during the night\daytime (make a note of how many and when).

Does it work or not

Now repeat with mediaportal running at same time.

Again does it now work or fail in any recordings.

One other thing you can check, are all your tuners working after resume has occured, to test this go to TVServer config\manual control, select a card and try activating timeshifting with it, if you cannot get this to work the card has not initiliased correctly before TVServer connects to it.

some things the logs will never tell you

 

[jameson_uk]

What you need to do is split this up between TVServer failing to record and Mediaportal causing the system to lock up, usually caused by video driver failing to reinitialise after resume.

Looks like this is it. I left the machine running with no client over two days with several recordings scheduled. It woke up perfectly every time (including EPG grabbing).

I am not sure if the problem is with the video driver not re-initializing after resume or something to do with the network connection taking a while to reconnect.

I am going to do some more digging but I have found MPStandbyHandler and this appears to be doing a better job of restarting the client on resume than ticking the option in the general config.

Will see if I can narrow this down any further

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

I am not sure if the problem is with the video driver not re-initializing after resume or something to do with the network connection taking a while to reconnect.

Yep MP very reliant on network, there are changes in MP1.0 that seem to overcome this shortfall, hopefully for all users.