When accessing MediaPortal via the XBMC plugin sometimes the tuner card is locked out until reboot (1 Viewer)

[clarkebelt]

We're having an issue where it appears that when trying to watch Live TV from XBMC (on a Linux box), every so often the tuner appears to get "hung" - specifically MediaPortal thinks it's in use even though it isn't, and at that point even the MedialPortal frontend can't access the card until we reboot. This happens even if XBMC is no longer running on the network.

Three questions: One, if it is time for a scheduled recording , will MediaPortal dump this "zombie" connection and begin the recording, or would this prevent any recordings until a reboot? Second, any way to prevent this from happening? And third, is there any way to break this "zombie" connection without rebooting the entire system? Just stopping and restarting the TV Server manually doesn't work - it appears to dump the connection and shows the card as idle, but still won't let anything use it until you reboot.

Note that we are not 100% sure that this only happens with the XBMC client, it's just that when we've seen this the backend always says that the XBMC plugin is in use, with whatever the last channel was that we tried to tune. But that is usually the failed attempt that made me aware of the problem, so it could have a cause totally unrelated to XBMC.[DOUBLEPOST=1402951627][/DOUBLEPOST]By the way I posted an XBMC log file excerpt from when this problem occurred at http://pastebin.ca/2809575

I find the references to the timeshift buffer puzzling.

 

[mm1352000]

Hello again

The XBMC log file doesn't tell us anything about why TV Server would think the tuner is in use. Please post the TV Server log files.

mm

 

[clarkebelt]

mm1352000, I never replied to this thread because I got caught up in chasing other issues, as you are well aware, but I just wanted to say that this issue seems to have abated somewhat. We still see an issue sometimes right after the TV Server is restarted, in that the very FIRST attempt to tune a channel fails, but after that it succeeds, and also we see it occasionally when tuning Live TV (especially on certain channels), where it will play a few seconds and then stop, but if you immediately restart it it works. We almost never see this issue with recordings now (at least not so far) so my theory is that maybe it has something to do with the streaming buffer used with Live TV, but since we almost never watch Live TV this is not a huge issue at the moment. Should it become one I may revisit this issue, but you have already helped me so much that I don't want to become a burden by asking you to track down issues that don't seem to be a significant problem at the moment. Thank you again for all the help you have given me!