NextPVR Forums

I've been using NPVR for quite a while and had very little trouble. Recently the computer I was using crashed and I was forced to upgrade to a Windows 7 computer. At the same time I also installed an HD-Homerun as my tuner. In my location I have about 15 QAM channels but that is all I need for what I want to record.

The install went well and I got everything set up and running fine pretty easy and everything appeared quite fine. All the shows I have scheduled have worked great and there have been no issues at all. But these were all one hour shows.

Recently I wanted to record some soccer matches and without exception the soccer matches recorded all the way through but when I went to view them they were only about 30-45 minutes long and the file size was shortened. That is I checked the file size about 3/4 of the way through the recording from another computer and saw it was well over 6gb and growing steadily as NPVR continued to write to it.

After the recording completed I went to watch it and it started exactly right and played beautifully for about 40 minutes anf then stopped as if it reached the end of the file. I checked the file on the disk and found it was only about 560mb. That is it was a LOT smaller than it was when I checked during the recording process.

This never happens on shorter recordings and to test I set up a series (3) of manual recordings to cover a soccer match in 40 minute intervals and the match recorded fine in that manner.

My questions are:
1. Is there a file size limit somewhere I have not located in NPVR?
2. Is this something in Windows 7 that I don't know about? BTW: I have many video files that are as large or larger that the ones that seem to give me problems.
3. If it is a file size problem is there a way to limit it without costing too much in quality? (These are .ts files)
4. Is there a way to tell NPVR to break up a recording into segments without using the, pretty clumsy, manual recording process?

Thanks for any advice.

Gilgamesh48 Wrote:My questions are:
1. Is there a file size limit somewhere I have not located in NPVR?

No, but make sure you're using a NTFS file system, not a FAT file system (since FAT has pretty small limits on the maximum file size)

Quote:2. Is this something in Windows 7 that I don't know about? BTW: I have many video files that are as large or larger that the ones that seem to give me problems.

No, assuming NTFS.

Quote:3. If it is a file size problem is there a way to limit it without costing too much in quality? (These are .ts files)

No, when it comes digital recordings, like those from your HDHomeRun, the broadcaster chooses the bitrate. NextPVR just dumps the digital stream to disk.

Quote:4. Is there a way to tell NPVR to break up a recording into segments without using the, pretty clumsy, manual recording process?

No. There is no functionality that would do this.

Quote:Recently I wanted to record some soccer matches and without exception the soccer matches recorded all the way through but when I went to view them they were only about 30-45 minutes long and the file size was shortened. That is I checked the file size about 3/4 of the way through the recording from another computer and saw it was well over 6gb and growing steadily as NPVR continued to write to it.

After the recording completed I went to watch it and it started exactly right and played beautifully for about 40 minutes anf then stopped as if it reached the end of the file. I checked the file on the disk and found it was only about 560mb.

I have no explanation for this. I cant see any way your file would have reduced in size unless you restarted the recording or recording service, or if you're running some postprocessing batch file that is manipulating files (like comclean or other utility). NextPVR only ever writes to the file while recording. It doesn't delete stuff, or truncate files. Maybe you've got a corrupt file system or disk or something?

For the record, I've seen zero other reports like this, so I'm pretty sure it's not something NextPVR is doing.

Thank you for the answers.

They were not what I wanted to hear but they were what I pretty much expected. Something in my setup is screwy but I really have no clue as to what it could be.

My disk is NTFS formatted and everything else seems fine.

I guess I will use the manual method for soccer matches. There are only a few a month so it is not really that hard.

Thank you again for the answers.

I think it's unlikely your description of events is entirely correct. I cant imagine the recording file shrunk after the recording complete, so I'd be double checking if that really happens. If it does happen again, you can post the logs covering the event and I can check if it there is something that stands out.

It's unlikely that manual recordings would help you if you have strange things like this happening.

Before I ever posted I verified that the issue was happening as described. From another computer I watched the file grow during recording to over 6gb and the saw that it was only 500mb after the process completed. I saw this happen twice before posting.

The reason manual recordings help is that instead of recording one 3 hour section I record 3 one hour sections and so never trigger the problem.

Since the problem is really not important to me because I have an effective workaround I do not think I need to spend ay more time on the problem.

As I said regular hour long shows always record fine and the soccer matches do as well if broken into one hour sections so I really do not have any issues that are important enough to spend a lot of time on.

Thanks for your attention.

Gilgamesh48 Wrote:Before I ever posted I verified that the issue was happening as described. From another computer I watched the file grow during recording to over 6gb and the saw that it was only 500mb after the process completed. I saw this happen twice before posting.

You need to post your logs so we can see it too.

Martin

Just to follow up on this.

There were other little problems that are too numerous and too elusive to enumerate but I finally got frustrated enough to install NPVR on a different computer and test there. After installing on the new computer (which is actually slower and with less ram) I found that the problem went away.

Since I don't view videos from the NPVR computer, I use an app on my Roku, the lesser power really matters very little.

Everything now seems fine and the long recordings are not shortened.

I fired up the old computer, after it had been idle for a couple of days, and it no longer boots reliably but I can get it to come up for a short period of time. It seems that something in the memory controller or the memory itself is failing. At some point I will try replacing the memory and/or possibly replacing the mother board but most probably I will just junk it as t cost less than $100.00 returned from lease and I have had it for a couple of years.

Thanks to those that tried to help but it turns out that it was not an NPVR issue rather it was defective hardware.