Well, after NextPVR's recording service crashed yet again last night, destroying almost all of Toonami without my knowledge until the following morning, I finally decided to bite the bullet and build an app to do something about it. I only regret not doing it sooner.
This app is designed to basically babysit NextPVR by monitoring the state of its recording service once per second. If it detects that the service has stopped for whatever reason, it will log the time at which this occurred, copy all of NextPVR's log files into a separate directory with this timestamp, and then attempt to restart the service. Once the service has been successfully restarted, it will log the time at which it restarted the service. From my own tests of manually stopping the service, it seems to restart it within 5 seconds of it stopping. The new folder full of the log file copies is in the same directory as the original log file folder, which is C:\Users\Public\NPVR\Log_yyyy-MM-DD_hh\hmm_ss, and it can then be perused at your leisure, or compressed and uploaded to this forum for the developers to peruse.
The application is completely open source and the code is available to download as part of the suite of tools that I have been developing to complement NextPVR. It can be found and downlaoded at my GitHub repository here:
WARNING: USE THIS SOFTWARE AT YOUR OWN RISK. It is designed to directly mess with NextPVR's central recording service, but only to restart it if it has stopped. Still, Murphy's Law: What can go wrong, will go wrong. NextPVR itself has proven that to me time and time again. I've tried my best to fool proof it by ensuring that it can only run one instance at a time and always run with administrator privileges so it can successfully restart the recording service, but still, be wary.
If anything does go wrong, please let me know in a reply to this thread and I'll do my best to fix it in the code and upload a new version.
If you have any suggestions on how I can further improve this application and any new features I can add to it, please don't hesitate to let me know in a reply to this thread.
Installation is simple. Just extract the contents of the ZIP file to the directory of your choice, and begin running the application with administrator privileges. It should ask you for admin privileges from the start, but if it doesn't, it will simply refuse to run, and you'll have to right click it and choose Run As Administrator.
If you want, you can also right click the executable and choose Create Shortcut, and then move the created shortcut file into either
in order to get it to start up at the time you start your computer so that it can monitor NextPVR's recording service right from the start.
EDIT 9/23/2019: Added SecsToStart to the configuration file that comes with the application so that the seconds it waits at startup before monitoring can be adjusted for when it's run from Startup on computers where NextPVR takes longer than usual to start its recording service itself.
EDIT 9/24/2019: Added a "Backup NextPVR Logs Now" button so that users can backup NextPVR's logs into a separate timestamped button at any time with just a single click, in case they need to backup the logs for another reason besides the recording service crashing.
Since this is a change to the GUI, I think it warrants a new version, Version 1.1, which can be downloaded below.
EDIT 9/29/2019: Improved the internal handling of the application, so that its GUI is no longer stuck frozen and unusable while waiting on initial startup. These improvements are in version 1.1 only, so I'm removing version 1 now.
Hi! I'm trying out the new version of NPVR on Linux on a raspberry pi. Thanks Sub for all the awesome work!
I have NPVR set up and I can see my HDHomerunPrime and under Devices I can see the 3 tuners. I exported my channels in an XML file from my windows NPVR instance but when I use the file location and I click scan, it shows all the channels and not the subset of channels as well as the new names I have for those channels. Am I doing something wrong or does this feature not exist in NPVR currently on the webserver?
Option to change the postion of channel groups, it's currently sorted alphabetically. It stays like this when imported into Kodi I have to manually edit the TV32.db to set the order i want
[ATTACH=CONFIG]47633[/ATTACH]
If it's not possible already can we export the channel list as a m3u. I'd like to be able to use that m3u with xTeVe and Plex because Plex seems to hate my dvb tuners.
Been using v5 for about a week or so now and haven't had an issues with channel changing or recordings so keep up the good work.
Is there some sort of ultimate codec download. I have HDHomeRun Cable Card boxes. All the ESPN networks seem to have some sort of issue with recording or playback either on the server or the nextpvr Kodi app.
The channels pixelate or go Matrix with audio which either stops playback all together or chops it all through the recording. It's not every single time but I cannot figure out the reason that just ESPN networks do this.
I do not know if I have the right software/hardware for my NextPVR server or if it's a HDHomeRun thing.
In web client, live video runs for about 20-30 seconds, then freezes. Log file attached. Started video in 13:08 minute, video actually started rolling about 13:09;15, froze about 13:09:43 (different clock so may be a few seconds off), and I waited one minute after that for the video to restart, which it didn't.
Same results on:
Windows/Chrome (on local network)
Windows/Firefox (on local network)
Windows/Edge (on local network)
Ubuntu/Firefox (on server)
Linux Mint/Firefox (on local network)
Linux Mint/Chromium (on local network)
Video always freezes within about 30 seconds, often shorter.
I installed the docker image on OMV server and I mapped the folders and loaded the channels and guide info. I am having trouble with streaming the channels and I am getting an error at the bottom of the screen that says "Recording Failed (transcoder exited)". I tried to watch it on kodi and I get the guide info but I get no video when I try to watch a live channel. I have attached my log files and any help or guidance would be awesome. Thanks
Ubuntu 18.04 server. Scheduled a recording 12:00pm to 12:30pm, using web interface. As of 12:46pm, it still lists the recording as "Pending"/"Upcoming". I didn't set any post-schedule recording time, just "Record Once" from the guide. The server created a ts file, which is stamped at 12:32, and plays fine with VLC. It also created an XML file (attached), also stamped 12:32pm. Both these files appear to be stable, and the tuner (HDHomeRun) isn't using any tuners at this time.
(I had a previous problem that resulted in an error message [Failed: Recording service not running at recording time], which I believe was preceded by this problem, and my attempt to recover from it. In that case, there was no XML file.)
I installed the ...190916 version of V5 and ran "InstallService.bat." Got a lot of OKs but service startup didn't complete. I changed the service startup parameter to "Manual" and rebooted. I started the service manually and this time it completed and shows "Running" in the task manager.
I next tried to record while not signed in:
- Start the desktop app.
- Scheduled a future show
- Signed out.
When the designated time arrived, nothing happened(the tuner LED didn't light). I signed back in and started "NextPVRServer.exe." After a few seconds, the tuner LED turned on and the show was recorded to completion.
Is this normal? I thought the service would allow recordings without being signed in. Have I got it wrong?
I decided to replace my 8-10 year old big footprint PVR with something more friendly for a lounge setup.
I decided on a bare bones Intel-NUC mini PC which fastens to the back of my TV.
Nice compact quiet runs Win 10 Pro really well.
Set it up with my preferred media center software, NPVR.
Now comes the problem when I want to playback any video at the first attempt there is no sound (sound over HDMI)!!
If I stop the video and then replay it I have sound, after this initial problem I can continue to play any other video file until after I have shut down NPVR and restarted it, then the problem recurs.
I installed many front end players none of which had this kind of sound issue. I settled on Kodi as the best of these to suit my tastes and this plays sound every time for every file, so it's not the setup it must be something in NPVR.
I really want to use NPVR but the faffing about has got me a bit frustrated.
Any ideas how to fix it? Please.
Bob
