TV Recordings Not Working Until Reboot (1 Viewer)

[threnode]

I'd be grateful if I could have some help, please, finding out why my Media Portal installation stopped recording TV for 3 days (until I rebooted my Media PC last night.) When troubleshooting this problem, I couldn't stop the TV service or kill it until I rebooted the PC.

The recordings were scheduled, but nothing recorded. The TV recordings folder has over 300GB free, and is writable.

I've attached all present Media Portal logs. I'm from the UK, and I'm recording both HD and SD Freeview.

Media Portal version is 1.7.1 (ie with hotfix.) [I've stuck with 1.7.1 because I want to have stable compatibility with the most recent Hauppauge HD PVR2 patch for Media Portal.]

The last TV recording prior to this problem was 'Diagnosis Murder' on Thursday 11th September at 18:10. Friday is a quiet TV day for me, but there should have been numerous shows recorded on Saturday 13th September (eg. Doctor Who, X Factor, Xtra Factor and Match of the Day.)

My TV service was running at the time of the non-recordings, although I have set the TV service to restart (via services.msc) after 1 minute should it stop unexpectedly. Live TV was working fine, but neither scheduled nor manual TV recordings produced any recorded files or xml documents in the TV recordings folder for a 3 day period.

I'm using TV Wish List to schedule my recordings, using keywords. TV Wish List is scheduled to check daily for TV content and update my scheduled recordings.

My HTPC: I installed Windows 8.1 64 bit on my Media PC on 24th August this year, specifically for Media Portal. I have 8GB RAM, 4GB of which is a software RAM drive for TV timeshifting. Media Portal TV client and server is set up on this PC.

I've gone through the TVService and TSWriter logs, but beyond looking at the Scheduler entries, I'm not sure which log entries are relevant to this issue. I haven't spotted anything helpful in the PC Event logs. The PC did sleep at 21:11 on Saturday night, but I've amended my power settings to stop that happening again.

I haven't rescanned my Freeview channels since the Freeview channel lineup changed on 3rd September. Could that somehow be related to this issue? I'm going to rescan my channels now.

Many thanks in advance for your help.

 

[mm1352000]

Hello and welcome

I'll get straight to the point: tuner 18 caused the scheduler to lock up, preventing stopping and starting of recordings.

This happened after repeatedly attempting to grab EPG for channel "Chart Show TV". When TV Server told the tuner to stop, it locked up and stopped responding.

When I say "repeatedly" I really do mean a lot. Over the time period from the start of the log files (11 September 6:30 pm) through to when the deadlock occurred (13 September 1:34 pm) TV Server tried and failed to grab EPG for that same channel 4991 times (!!!). I have observed similar "deadlocks" with TBS tuners in the past where they eventually fail after being asked to tune the same channel over and over again many times, and I suspect that is what has happened here.

The solution is to configure EPG grabbing appropriately. At least untick "Chart Show TV"... though it looks like you use WebEPG, so if I were you I'd be thinking about disabling the DVB EPG grabber completely.

Regards,
mm

 

[threnode]

Hi MM.

Thank you for the quick response. I spotted those Chart Show TV entries in the logs, but I didn't realise that had caused the tuner lock.

The Chart TV listing issue has arisen after the UK Freeview channel line-up change on 3rd September. To quote from Wikipedia:

"On 8 May 2014, Chart Show TV launched on Freeview, on channel 67. It became a placeholder on 3 September 2014 along with the Freeview retune, and was removed from Freeview on all regions, including London, except in Manchester on 8 September."

Curiously, Chart Show TV is still showing up when I scan for channels, even though this channel no long exists in the Freeview lineup! I've manually deleted it from my channel lineup and unticked it under the list of DVB EPG channels.

I'm only using WebEPG at the moment for one SKY channel. I like the DVB EPG listings option, because up until now, it has just worked with minimal fuss. I used Windows Media Center previously, and whilst it was reliable for recording, the channel re-configuration, whenever the UK Freeview channel lineup changed, was a nightmare.

So I'll stick with DVB EPG for now, but keep a close eye on the Media Portal tvservice log when I next need to retune the channel lineup. Many thanks for your help.

 

[mm1352000]

Hello again

Curiously, Chart Show TV is still showing up when I scan for channels, even though this channel no long exists in the Freeview lineup! I've manually deleted it from my channel lineup and unticked it under the list of DVB EPG channels.

TV Server never automatically deletes channels, so that is why it was still showing.

Regards,
mm