[solved] TV Server Service preventing sleep (1 Viewer)

[Stéphane Lenclud]

@HTPCSourcer Do you know what the Timeout field controls for EPG idle grabber?
I had it set to one minute and my PC would turn back on shortly after going to sleep.

 

[HTPCSourcer]

MM would be the right person to answer this. From what I observed I concluded that once timeout reached, a fresh cycle of EPG grab is started, i.e. again from scratch. Since the whole cycle needs longer than the timeout, the computer is never idle.

Set at really long time with would also allow a periodic wake-up of the machine, eg every day 6 hours. Yet that appears redundant. So frankly speaking, I don't know.

 

[CyberSimian]

Do you know what the Timeout field controls for EPG idle grabber? I had it set to one minute and my PC would turn back on shortly after going to sleep.

The "Idle Timeout" is how long TV Server will use a tuner to grab the EPG if TV Server is not using any of the tuners for live TV or recording. This time does not include the database update phase that occurs after EPG grabbing from the tuner has finished.

How long it takes to receive a full EPG depends on how many channels you can receive, and what sort of programmes they broadcast (movies = relatively few EPG entries, childrens = lots of EPG entries for lots of very short programmes). If you enable DEBUG logging in TV Server, and temporarily change the timeout to a large value (e.g. 60 minutes), you can look at the log file to see how long a complete EPG grab takes (TV Server has some criterion for deciding when it has seen everything, at which point it stops grabbing).

Example: when digital broadcasting started in the UK, it was reckoned that a complete EPG could be received in 4 minutes. Some testing that I did 3 years ago showed that by then this had increased to 8 to 10 minutes (due to the increased number of channels). My perception is that a full EPG grab in the UK now takes even longer. Obviously these times will be different in your part of the world.

Looking at your options, I think that the "Refresh" setting should be longer than 30 minutes. The default is 2 hours (although I have mine set to 1 hour). Also, in PowerScheduler you don't need to wake the HTPC to grab the EPG. If you are using the broadcast EPG, TV Server will usually update the EPG before it goes to sleep when you have finished recording or watching live TV (depends on the value of the "Refresh" setting). The PowerScheduler setting is for downloading the EPG from the internet.

This is the advice from mm that I usually quote when questions about EPG grabbing occur:

EPG for DVB-T not working

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

 

[Stéphane Lenclud]

Thanks guys for your input. I've set both "Timeout" and "Refresh" to 720mn/12h and it looks like it's working just fine now.
I've also disabled PowerScheduler "Wakeup the computer for EPG grabbing" option.

 

[CyberSimian]

I've set both "Timeout" and "Refresh" to 720mn/12h

People who download the EPG from the internet usually do so once per day. The disadvantage of this is that TV Server misses changes to the schedule that occur within a few hours of broadcast. These changes might be:

(1) Changes to the start or end times of the programme to be recorded (for example, due to an earlier programme such as live sport or a news bulletin overrunning), or

(2) Changes to the programme description (for example, a generic description such as "The Panorama team report on a story in the news" changing to a specific description of the subject covered by the programme).

In contrast, people who use the broadcast EPG can refresh the EPG as frequently as they wish, and thereby receive last-minute changes to the EPG. Although refreshing every 30 minutes is perhaps too frequent, refreshing every 12 hours may result in missing changes to the EPG that occur within a few hours of broadcast. So there is an optimum setting for the refresh interval somewhere between those two values.

TV Server does allow the EPG to be grabbed while the tuners are in use for live TV or recording. This would be ideal for receiving last-minute changes to the EPG, but my experience using it was somewhat mixed -- there were occasions when the tuners seemed to become inaccessible one by one, for no obvious reason. Since I have stopped using that facility, tuner lockup has become much less common (and perhaps it is entirely due to an unreliable tuner driver rather than a bug in TV Server).

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

 

[Stéphane Lenclud]

EPG grabbing while viewing channels works fine here as I've set it up. You only need to wait one minute for it to go through.
In fact until I fixed my idle EPG following @HTPCSourcer suggestions it was the only EPG grabbing method that was working correctly.

 

[HTPCSourcer]

You should try Lehmden's EPG grabber. Best possible solution for anybody who is located in Germany.

 

[Stéphane Lenclud]

You should try Lehmden's EPG grabber. Best possible solution for anybody who is located in Germany.

Well DVB EPG has been working just fine for years despite being misconfigured so I won't bother for now. It's good to know though.

 

[Stéphane Lenclud]

So now my server goes to sleep as it should it seems. What's cool is that when a client starts up it wakes up the server through WOL most likely. Awesome stuff!