Question on Manual Control screen in TV Server Config (1 Viewer)

[mm1352000]

Hi again Lee

I hope it solves the problem but I really have my doubts. Would have been nice if you could have posted logs so that we could take a look. Good luck with the new card...

mm

 

[Pom]

I hope so too! At least i'll have a spare if not ;-) Yes i should of posted logs, might still do this later...

I did a lot of messing around with hardware and drivers to try and eliminate things before coming to the conclusion that i did - stuff that i did not write on this forum. One thing i am sure of is that it is a hardware fault and that the fault lies within the HTPC. One thing i didn't mention is that a couple of weeks ago one of those rubbish little stick-on heatsinks that i had stuck on the regulators on my graphics card had slipped down so far over time that it eventually shorted out a capacitor and hence one of the PSU supply rails. The PSU shut itself down quickly as designed, and after removing the short i was surprised to find that everything still worked! Or did it...

Can faulty tuners cause problems playing back recordings? Had a few MP crashes over the last couple of days when playing back specific recordings. After the most recent one the error log only had a few entries and all were related to "nsm.exe thumbnail creation failed" and "deleting invalid recording"... Very strange behaviour. By the way i have the "fileexistence cache" thingy setting disabled.

I've purged all my recordings now but if it does it again i'll post logs in the appropriate thread. I'll also try and post logs later for this satellite tuner problem.

 

[mm1352000]

Can faulty tuners cause problems playing back recordings?

Unlikely unless the recording itself is totally corrupt. System event logs would give us a starter on what happened. They're included with the logs gathered by the watchdog.

I look forward to the logs whenever you're ready.

 

[Pom]

Ok, here's some logs. First some background information:

My DVB-S tuning fault manifests itself in 3 main ways:
1. Can't tune to Channel 4 HD ("No Signal Detected")
2. Can't tune to ITV1 HD ("Cannot Start Timeshifting")
3. SD channels choppy and breaking up

- With all of the above, the 'discontinuities' count viewed within Tuning Details reaches 10s to 100s within a minute or so.
- Rebooting the PC or leaving it off for a while tends to cure the problem for a while.

So for the logs, i started MP in debug mode (option 1) around 7.30am today (02-11-2011). There's a lot of older files in there too (sory - I thought debug mode clears the logs down first).

This is what i did:
1. Went from Home to Guide
2. Selected Channel 4 HD = Fail (No Signal Detected)
3. Selected ITV1 HD = OK
4. Selected BBC HD = OK
5. Close MP

Note: Channel 4 HD WAS broadcasting porgrams at the time!

While you're at it ;-), you may be able to tell me why the PC did not enter sleep mode after recording Celebrity Juice on ITV2 last night (around 10pm). I am alos having standby issues (in another thread), first with not sleeping on remote Power button press (fixed by installing PowerScheduler++) but now it does not shut down by itself if i leave it on Home screen (timer set to 10mins).

Thanks for your help on this - much appreciated.

 

[mm1352000]

Hi again

1. Can't tune to Channel 4 HD ("No Signal Detected")

That is because your tuning parameters for that channel are wrong. The details should be:

Frequency: 12607000 kHz
Symbol rate: 27500
Polarisation: vertical
Modulation: QPSK
Inner FEC Rate: 3/4
Pilot: off
Roll-off: 0.35

Setting the correct modulation and FEC rate (and pilot and roll-off) are particularly important for DVB-S2 tuning.

2. Can't tune to ITV1 HD ("Cannot Start Timeshifting")

I only see one case of failure to tune ITV1 HD - that was because your DVB-S tuner was disabled at the time.

2011-10-31 19:44:39.796600 [(30)]: Controller: find card for channel ITV1 HD
2011-10-31 19:44:39.799600 [(30)]: Controller: got 1 tuning details for ITV1 HD
2011-10-31 19:44:39.799600 [(30)]: Controller: channel #1 DVBS:tv:BSkyB ITV1 HD Freq:10936000 ONID:2 TSID:2056 SID:3851 PMT:0x121 FTA:True LCN:6607 SymbolRate:22000 Modulation:ModNotSet Polarisation:LinearV InnerFecRate:Rate5_6 DisEqc:None band:Universal Pilot:NotSet RollOff:NotSet
2011-10-31 19:44:39.800600 [(30)]: Controller: card:6 typevbT cannot tune to channel
2011-10-31 19:44:39.800600 [(30)]: Controller: card:7 typevbS is disabled
2011-10-31 19:44:39.800600 [(30)]: Controller: card:1 typevbIP cannot tune to channel
2011-10-31 19:44:39.800600 [(30)]: Controller: card:3 type:RadioWebStream cannot tune to channel
2011-10-31 19:44:39.801600 [(30)]: Controller: found 0 card(s) for channel
2011-10-31 19:44:39.801600 [(30)]: AdvancedCardAllocation.GetAvailableCardsForChannel took 4 msec
2011-10-31 19:44:39.801600 [(30)]: Controller: found 0 free card(s)

3. SD channels choppy and breaking up

I see discontinuities on both the DVB-T and DVB-S2 tuner.

Rebooting the PC or leaving it off for a while tends to cure the problem for a while.

That makes me wonder whether it might be overheating issues. I can't see any particular pattern in the channels that seem to exhibit problems.

mm

 

[Pom]

mm - thanks for your analysis. The logs date back a few days, at one point i disabled the DVB-S card because the problems were so bad at the time - when it was diabled i selected the odd channel to make sure it really was. That's what you've seen in the logs.

Re C4 HD tuning parameters, i will pump in the ones you gave me, but i still saw problems with this channel after i did a full channel rescan and let MP populate the parameters. This is actually what prompted me to put values in for FEC rate etc. which MP seemed to have left as "Not selected" or something along those lines. Admittedly i got those parameters off another forum but seemed to work ok after i'd put them in!

Please can you advise as to what hardware (and software) elements can cause 100's of discontinuities in the space of a couple of minutes? Obviously the tuner itself, but what about codecs and the graphics card? I recently changed to PDVD10 codecs from PDVD8. It's the intermittent nature that is difficult in all this. For example, last night around 8.30pm, C4HD and ITV1 HD were working perfectly when i tested them (you may spot this in the logs). Then this morning (after PC failed to enter sleep mode and had been on all night...) C4HD was broken.

Yes i agree that evidence points to an overheating problem. I still don't think the graphics card is involved because problems seem to be with DVB-S only, plus my GPU runs at 50-52°C under full load thanks to the hefty passive cooler i pimped it with.

Cheers
Lee

PS. The logs probably weren't a good set for you to look at as i only captured symptom #1 this morning. I wouldn't necessarily expect you to find symptoms 2 and 3 by trawling back through the old logs. The vast number of 'discontinuities' i mentioned - i mean 100's, even more than 1000 literally within a minute or less! I appreciate that you may find some on the DVB-T channels also, but not this crazy number.

I will try and provide a better set of logs if i can showing all 3 problems.

 

[mm1352000]

Hi again

The logs date back a few days, at one point i disabled the DVB-S card because the problems were so bad at the time - when it was diabled i selected the odd channel to make sure it really was. That's what you've seen in the logs.

Okay. I guess those logs don't show that problem then. I'll check out the new logs when you post them.

Re C4 HD tuning parameters, i will pump in the ones you gave me, but i still saw problems with this channel after i did a full channel rescan and let MP populate the parameters.

Did you "update satellite list" before the scan? That gets the most up-to-date list of transponders for all satellites from fastsatfinder. I do note that there is another plain DVB-S transponder with the same frequency on that satellite. Maybe logs for a full scan could help me figure out what happened here...

Please can you advise as to what hardware (and software) elements can cause 100's of discontinuities in the space of a couple of minutes? Obviously the tuner itself, but what about codecs and the graphics card?

I tried to earlier in the thread:

Discontinuities in TsWriter logs rule out everything except:
- the tuning parameters
- the tuner hardware
- the tuner driver
- the HDD
- dish alignment
- cabling
- connectors
- splitters/switches
- LNB
- interference

Note: I missed heat levels

The fact that the discontinuities are present in the TsWriter logs means that the issue is way upstream from codecs and playback. TsWriter is the first place in MediaPortal/TV Server where you can observe problems. If you have problems there then it is because the stream source is bad (which can be caused by a number of things) or because your timeshifting HDD is being given a workover.

I recently changed to PDVD10 codecs from PDVD8.

That won't make a shred of difference. As I said, the discontinuities are present in the stream before you even try to play it.

It's the intermittent nature that is difficult in all this. For example, last night around 8.30pm, C4HD and ITV1 HD were working perfectly when i tested them (you may spot this in the logs). Then this morning (after PC failed to enter sleep mode and had been on all night...) C4HD was broken.

Well, signal problems can be intermittent, as can heat levels. And sleep/resume cycles can also be a problem for some hardware.

Yes i agree that evidence points to an overheating problem.

I want to be clear that is only a suggestion. There are many options - just look at the list above. Overheating is less common than many of those.

I still don't think the graphics card is involved...

It is not, unless it is causing heat (possible) or PCIe bus contention issues (unlikely).

...because problems seem to be with DVB-S only...

Sorry but that is not what I see in the logs. DVB-T signals also have discontinuities there. Maybe not the 100's or 1000's you're talking about, but still. It only takes one discontinuity in the right place to make the picture or audio do hickups.

...plus my GPU runs at 50-52°C under full load thanks to the hefty passive cooler i pimped it with.

The GPU temp measurement may be low, but that heat is still generated - it is just being dissipated from the GPU better. Have you got a "silent" fan directing the heat out of the case to prevent heat build-up in the case? Are the tuner(s) within close proximity of the GPU heatsink?

I will try and provide a better set of logs if i can showing all 3 problems.

That would be good.

mm

 

[Pom]

Ok, here's some more logs. This time nothing to do with C4 HD, SD channel 'POP' this time. The log directories were purged before the first set of logs. The set of logs with earlier time stamp were from simply:

- Start MP
- Tune to POP
- Within seconds MP crashed due to the problem

The later set of logs (these will contain the problem above too so skip through that bit ;-) what happened is something like this:

- Start MP
- Started watching a recording (Simpsons)
- Paused recording around 5.30pm ish
- stopped recording around 7.40pm ish and tuned to POP
- Within seconds MP crashed again due to the problem
- After logs were gathered, watched DVB-T all night with no problems!

MP is so stable on my hardware these days that the only thing that has caused MP to crash in the last couple of years was faulty RAM. So that's why i am convinced it is a hardware failure and my money is still on the DVB-S2 card. The fault is pretty permanent now, even after PC been off all night - so not a heat problem now as far as i am concerned.

I also happen to be an electronics design engineer (13 years) so i make my diagnosis with conviction!

Cheers,
Lee

 

[Pom]

So it's not the tuner hardware then... going to replace LNB and cables now - cheap enough and these are years old.

 

[mm1352000]

Hi again Lee

Sorry I've been away for a couple of days. Any update? What convinced you that it wasn't the tuner hardware - I guess maybe the new tuner arrived and had the same problem? Hope you managed to make some progress.

mm