Pausing live TV

[Tre4Bax]

My wife pointed out to me the other day that there seems to be an issue with the pause facility on live TV.

If you use it for a couple of minutes all is usually fine, but occasionally it will leap to live TV when unpaused and you lose your place in the paused program. My wife however is in the habit of pausing and taking a phone call or something and 20 mins later unpausing. When you do this it is inevitable when unpaused it will jump to live and lose the part of the program.

I keep suggesting she records instead, but she got in this habit when using MCE and it worked fine. Is there a setting or something that changes the amount of time the buffer works for, or do I have an issue with my setup?

[johnsonx42]

it's a bug, or perhaps just a limitation of the way it's implemented. NPVR records multiple buffer files called "slip files" to allow timeshifting of livetv. you can skip back and forth across multiple slip files, BUT it won't be able to remember your pause location once you've been paused long enough to move to a new slip file. these slip files are 6 minutes by default.

you can improve matters however by increasing the slip file size using a registry value:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\NPVR\SlipSeconds=xxxx

If not specified in the registry, the default is 1200 (decimal DWORD).

(if you're on 64-bit, then the NPVR settings are under Wow6432Node)

you'll need to restart the recording service after changing this setting.

[Reddwarf]

I have SlipSeconds set to 7200 but npvr still loses track of the live tv position when I pause the second time, so there's obviously another bug also.