Recording cut short but no error

[phmt]

Running NPVR 2.5.5 on Winxp and saving recordings to NAS using UNC path. My tunner is HDHomerun Prime. I have what appears to be something of a mystery. I have just started using npvr and successfully completed some manual recordings (initial testing). Also successfully completed a couple of recordings of shows that had already started when I started recording.

My first two attempts to request a recording in a future time slot had issues. Several hours earlier, I selected two shows (using NEWA) to start recording at 8pm (one 1hr show and 1 2hr show). The next morning I looked and both shows had very small file sizes. I played both of them and apparently, in both cases, only the first ~10 minutes recorded. I could not find any errors anywhere. I even checked winxp event viewer and nothing. NPVR was not running so there were no entries whatsoever in the log for that time period. I could not see anything unusual in Nrecord (attached) either. It appears to have run and ended normally. I thought something happened with my NAS, but nothing in the logs there, everything looks normal. In fact the time stamp on the files is the correct end time in each case.

I am stumped. Any ideas?

[mvallevand]

I'm not saying that this is your problem but XP users need to apply the DVB Fix (google for Mediaportal DVBfix)

Martin

[phmt]

I'm not saying that this is your problem but XP users need to apply the DVB Fix (google for Mediaportal DVBfix)

Martin

I saw the DVB fix earlier when I was searching through these forums. I did a quick read up on it elsewhere and thought that it only applied to XP using DVB and analog tuner cards. In my case I use the HDHomerun Prime which is a network tuner. I don't think that the DVB fix applies to me, but I will read up on it some more.

Thanks

[sub]

I saw the DVB fix earlier when I was searching through these forums. I did a quick read up on it elsewhere and thought that it only applied to XP using DVB and analog tuner cards. In my case I use the HDHomerun Prime which is a network tuner. I don't think that the DVB fix applies to me, but I will read up on it some more.

It's not related to analog. It applies to digital devices (ATSC/QAM/DVB) on WinXP. The HDHomeRun is in this category, so it applies to you if you're on XP.

[phmt]

I installed the DVB fix, but it did not help. About 3/4 of the recordings saved directly to the network share were still cut short by anywhere between ~10 min to ~40 min. And it is not due to any padding, I only have 1-2 min of padding. These were multiple concurrent streams of HD recordings, so maybe there is some load issue. I do have a 1Gb wired network with good measured iperf speeds. The laptop is a core 2 duo, which I thought would be enough. I tried recording multiple streams of HD video to the local hard drive and that seemed to work ok so it might be some load issue coupled with XP, I don't know. I will try to do more testing to see if I can figure out what works and what does not.

[phmt]

Just in case someone else has this problem, it turns out I think that it was network packet loss related (or something along those lines) in combination with an older network adapter. When I had the issue my tuner (HDHomerun Prime) was connected to a LAN switch port on my firewall, threat management router with another LAN port connected to my main switch which then connected to my npvr backend server. Using hdhomerun_config I was able to see a fair number of network errors which I think eventually cased either my HDHR Prime, the ethernet card, or npvr to pause. The stream would pick back up after a few seconds, but basically the actual saving to the HD stopped at that point. Nothing errored out that I could see, but I could consistently see what appeared to be an interruption in the flow of data. Anyway, moving the HDHR Prime off the firewall router and plugging it into my main switch instead, fixed the problem.