Unstable on UK Freeview since January

[robbyp]

I've been using NextPVR for the last four years very successfully with a TBS Dual HD card and an old dual Nova T500 on UK Freeview, Mendip transmitter.

Since January, i've been experiencing major problems. First problem was the Legacy Kernel Caller sleep problem, where it does not release sleep lock on the PC and it stays away. Second problem is bad recordings, either it fails or it creates a giant GB recording which does not play. Third problem is not stopping recording, one ended up about 200GB!

First thought was bad hardware, so I removed the old Nova T (10 years old).. no good. Then I retroed NextPVR back to 3.X - no good. Nothing worked. So I thought fresh hardware (and I wanted one too) so I bought a Hauppauge quad channel card. Just that in the PC. Same problems.

So last week I reinstalled windows, completely clean, just nextpvr and the Hauppauge card. No other peripherals.

But its still going wrong. And as I noted in another post, I too saw last night that the digital host was using 1.5GB of ram. And it won't sleep (randomly), still creating bad recordings, etc.

So to sum up, i've tried different cards, therefore different drivers. I've cleaned the PC and just had NextPVR running. And its still bad.

Now something else someone says may be causing this. In Jan we had a minor retune, BBC4 HD to com8. This is around the time problems started. I record BBC 4 HD often. Last friday 23rd I recorded a bbc 4 program and it was bad, gigantic, never slept etc. Last night I recorded one from 8-9:30pm and it did not stop the recording and stopped the machine from sleeping on time.

I'm wondering if there is an underlying bug which is causing either nextpvr or the drivers to go wrong due to this retune and use of this multiplex (note i've used both TBS and Hauppauge cards, so different drivers). I also wonder if its related to recording multiple programs from one multiplex. All in all its not obvious the direct cause.

The major retune is tomorrow, 27th, when the 700MHz band is removed. So maybe that will fix it..

In the meanwhile, today, i'll try record multiple shows but avoid BBC 4 HD and see if I can isolate it to that multiplex.

Rob

[Graham]

Since January, i've been experiencing major problems. First problem was the Legacy Kernel Caller sleep problem, where it does not release sleep lock on the PC and it stays away. Second problem is bad recordings, either it fails or it creates a giant GB recording which does not play. Third problem is not stopping recording, one ended up about 200GB!

Someone might need to use the eval version of TSCapture (from http://tscapture.com) to capture me a 1 minute full transport stream of this frequency, and put the file somewhere I can download from.

Can you guys check what <CollectEIT> is set to in your config.xml? If you set it to false, does the problem go away? It will disable DVB EPG, but I just want to temporarily test if it's a factor.

This is under investigation in the other thread ... apologies if you are up to speed with progress there.

[Bobins]

The move of BBC4 HD to COM8 seems to have caused problems for lots of people (not just NPVR users) but in itself, nothing has supposed to have fundamentally changed with BBC4 itself.
Because were now going to get multiple adjacent transmitters on the same frequency (what they're calling SFN or Single Frequency Network), they've changed the guard interval which should help stop different transmitters on the same frequency interfering with each other. That in itself shouldn't cause the problems we're seeing (unless the tuner card drivers don't like it).
COM8 carries more EIT (EPG type data) than the other COM muxes but again, it's not supposed to be excessive so isn't supposed to be a problem.

If there was something fundamentally wrong with what we're seeing on COM8 then it should affect the other channels on that mux (e.g. CBeebies HD or maybe no one records those so it's not getting reported.)

Watch the Zombie Recordings thread for details of current investigation.

[robbyp]

Thanks.. will monitor.