Auto-concatenate on GBPVR recording interruption?

[ACTCMS]

Well yes, one way or another, restarting the recording service while recording is the only way to produce an orphan recording file and a -0 continuation file. So in a perfect world it would never happen. I don't live there.

Quote Murphy (slighly paraphrased) "if it can happen, it will and it will always wait for the worst time to do it (during one of the wife's recordings)..."

[Jaggy]

So in a perfect world it would never happen. I don't live there.

I certainly don't live there... even though we in this area are charged one of the highest rates for power in NZ we still have a pile of short, less than 30 second (plus more than our fair share of long) power-cuts & these end up with me having to pass onto the Boss that she will need to goto Videos...etc. etc.

So another +1 from here.

[Jakesty]

I certainly don't live there... even though we in this area are charged one of the highest rates for power in NZ we still have a pile of short, less than 30 second (plus more than our fair share of long) power-cuts & these end up with me having to pass onto the Boss that she will need to goto Videos...etc. etc.

So another +1 from here.

Need to get yourself at least a low end UPS. I spent some money on mine, (APC BR-1500, about $200US), but mainly to keep the server and network hardware running including the HDHomerun network tuners. My UPS will also do an orderly shutdown of the server after a given number of minutes too. Hopefully so that databases don't get corrupted. This UPS and a whole house spike protection have me a little less worried about power now.

Speaking of the cost of power, my bill was $295 last month. Multiple freezers, several computers (24/7), and the A/C running almost non-stop, that's a killer bill!

[mvallevand]

I didn't appreciate that so many people had power and PC problems during a recording. I thought about it more and the logic for the tool isn't tough but originally I was thinking it was something that could be done in ParallelProcessing.bat but it probably makes more sense in PostProcessing.bat if there are power issues. It also seems to only be useful if the recording services restarts and the file is still recording. There is no real hook to show what you might have recorded only the first portion(s) of.

Martin

[BrettB]

Martin,

If you're thinking about adding some functionality to imageGrabLite to "help" with the situation where a recording ends up with multiple file pieces, I'll add a few more thoughts:

1. I wouldn't want it to just "join" the files (either by concatination or some fancier fix to help with any timelline issues, etc.) becuase then in the reocrdings listing, it would appear as if the recording was fine and complete. And even beginning to play the file wouldn't give any indication that part of it was missing unless the watcher happened to look at the ending length of the timeline OSD.
   
2. So, having multiple recording listings for each file part with some sort of idication (i.e. "Segment 1", "Segment 2", etc.) would at least give some indication of a "problem" with the recording.
   
3. Often, shows that I record (especially cable network serieses) are repeated multiple times in the week. IF I happen to notice that there was a problem with a recording in time, I can often go in and schedule it to record the next time it is airing and then get a complete recording and delete the partial recordings.
   
4. I have often thought that it would be nice if NPVR had a method of notifying me (for instance via email) if there is any sort of problem detected with a recording. (Multiple parts, no tuner available, tuned but no data in the .ts file, etc.), so that I would know about it in a timely manner and could take appropriate action (i.e. scheduling it to record the next time it airs, reboot/reconnect the DCR-2650, reseat the Avermedia card or a USB tuner so that it shows up in the devices list again, etc.). I thought that it might be possible to do something like this in the PostProcessing.bat file. (But, I don't think that would get run if there wasn't a tuner available. I'm not sure about the case where it is tuned, but the .ts file is 0 bytes...)
   
5. What would be really cool would be if that problem detection tool would also automatically check the EPG to see if there was another airing of the same show (I guess this functionality might only work if the guide data included the unique id), and would schedule the next airing to record.
   

Just a few ideas to ponder...

- Brett

[ACTCMS]

I didn't appreciate that so many people had power and PC problems during a recording. I thought about it more and the logic for the tool isn't tough but originally I was thinking it was something that could be done in ParallelProcessing.bat but it probably makes more sense in PostProcessing.bat if there are power issues. It also seems to only be useful if the recording services restarts and the file is still recording. There is no real hook to show what you might have recorded only the first portion(s) of.

Martin

PostProcessing.bat sounds good to me. If the filename passed has a "-n" suffix, then there's probably one (or more) orphans with the same base filename. Adding each of these to the DB would be one way to go. It's a pity the suffix sequence starts with "-0" otherwise part one of the file could be renamed with suffix "-0" - then all the elements would sort to the correct order. obviously it all depends on normal service being restored while the program is still being broadcast.

Alex

[mvallevand]

Brett, I was going to add this to the program I use to schedule by unique id anyway so it is easy in North America to re-schedule I will flag these all these as errors and the Red warning order will tell you segment it is. I suppose I can do a reschedule on zero-byte files too.

Alex, when I add the records I will update the recorded start and end times with the file created and modified times, for the date sort.. Then name sort is meaningless because the name to NextPVR is simply the series name.

Since PostProcessing only runs on successful completes so it isn't very useful for error or watchdog style trapping.

Martin

[sub]

See if this helps.

[BrettB]

I suppose I can do a reschedule on zero-byte files too.

Since PostProcessing only runs on successful completes so it isn't very useful for error or watchdog style trapping.

Martin

Martin,

Thanks! The zero-byte files option would be very helpful for me. I'm still occasionally having problems with the DCR-2650 where it just "disappears" from Windows. If I unplug and re-plug the USB cable, then it will come back and work fine. I think that it is some problem with the Hauppauge drivers, but they haven't been able to track it down.

Might you also be able to exit with a different return status so that the batch file could take some action such as sending an email message?

So this solution doesn't cover every possibility, but it is an improvement!

[mvallevand]

BrettB do you still need the ability to automatically rerecord a 0 byte file after sub's change. You can can get your email if you add something like this to your post processing

Code:

@echo off
setLocal EnableDelayedExpansion
echo processing %1
for /f "tokens=* delims= " %%a in ('dir/b %1') do (
if %%~Za neq 0 goto notzero
echo email me
:notzero
echo all done
)

Martin