NextPVR Forums

Hi

I have been using NextPVR for about 7 months, and it has been working very well. On Oct. 21 I upgraded to 4.0.4, and things seemed to be working well. But on Friday night and again on Saturday night, there were recordings made with very small files - on Thursday night for a 1 hour show the .ts file was 818 kb, and on Saturday night for a 30 minute news broadcast it was 736 kb - each of these files should have been gigabytes. Neither of these recording was flaged as failed in the NextPVR Windows interface under Ready Recordings or What's New/

I have looked at the NRecord.log.2 file in the uploaded zip for the recording on Friday night, and at 2017-10-27 20:57:00.669 there is a log record that reads [ERROR][31] Unexpected error downloading seasonwide . It appears that NextPVR was accessing the TVDB when it encountered an error, but this could be incorrect as I have no knowledge of the code. Could this have been the reason the recording failed?

When I checked the NRecord.log.2 at 2017-10-28 22:58:00.284 where is started recording the news show on Saturday night there is no error 31 written during the recording, so there seems to be no pattern to the failures.

My set up is a two tuner HDHomeRun, which is then enabled in NextPVR. I had one problem back in the spring where the HDHomeRun box told NextPVR that there were no tuners available, but in that case NextPVR clearly noted the recordings as 'Failed', and as noted above this is not the case for these two failed recordings. The solution suggested by the HDHomeRun team to solve the 'all tuners in use problem' last spring was to simply reboot it (power off and on) which appeared to solve the problem. I checked today and I could watch two channels simultaneously, and when I tried to watch a third I did get a no tuners available error.

I have uploaded a zip that contains the log directory, and another zip file that contains the files written out by NextPVR during the failed recordings.

Thanks.

PapaJay Wrote:Hi
I have looked at the NRecord.log.2 file in the uploaded zip for the recording on Friday night, and at 2017-10-27 20:57:00.669 there is a log record that reads [ERROR][31] Unexpected error downloading seasonwide . It appears that NextPVR was accessing the TVDB when it encountered an error, but this could be incorrect as I have no knowledge of the code. Could this have been the reason the recording failed?

When I checked the NRecord.log.2 at 2017-10-28 22:58:00.284 where is started recording the news show on Saturday night there is no error 31 written during the recording, so there seems to be no pattern to the failures.

Just ignore these messages - it's just saying it didn't find artwork. This is pretty common and won't cause any issues.

I'm guessing its a specific channel you're having problems with, and every recording on that channel will fail. Maybe you lost a bit of your antenna in a storm, or the broadcaster has reduced the power of the transmitter to stop interference, or you've added a splitter, or something similar.

Try deleting the channel and rescanning for it.

You could also try checking the reported signal strength in the SiliconDust tools for a good channel vs a poor one.

Sub, thanks for the update on the Error 31. I thought they could be ignored, but was not sure.

The antenna is fine - I had checked it about a month ago, and I went back up on the roof and checked it again today.

I used the HDHomeRun Signal Meter to aim my antenna when I installed it in November of 2016. The two recording failures were from two different channels.

The failure on Friday night was on channel 41 - Global TV here in Toronto. I just checked the signal again using the meter and the Signal Strength is 100, SNR Quality is 98 and Sym Quality is 100. These high levels are expected as the broadcast is from the CN Tower which is only 26 km from my house, and can be seen easily from the location of the antenna.

The failure on Saturday night was on channel 9 - CTV here in Toronto. Metering values today are: Signal Strength 100, SNR Quality 85, Sym Quality 100.

These readings don't mean there wasn't a problem on Friday and Saturday night respectively at the time we attempted to record them. There was a good recording on CTV on Friday night right after the failure on Global, and we had 3 successful recordings Sunday night - two on Global and one on CTV.

For the moment, I think the best thing to do is to assume these two were a transmission problems and continue to monitor. Should there be additional instances of incomplete recordings, I will post to this thread again.

Thank you for your prompt assistance.