Wake - Sleep Interaction -> Failed Recordings

[careads]

My system did not go back to sleep quickly. It took 15 minutes to go to sleep. The last time I used the computer was at 8:43:23. The computer sleeps after 15 minutes of inactivity (8:58:23), which comes after the backup wake-up and before the pre-padding.

[sub]

Neither of the two wakes caused any action to take place.  My system was already awake from using it about 15 minutes earlier.  There were no wake events to use as triggers.

FYI, it doesn't use the machine waking as any sort of trigger to do anything. If knows it has to start a recording at time x, it just asks Windows to make sure it is awake at that time - so that application will have a chance to kick off any recordings that are due to start.

My system was already awake for both of the wakes. 

If that is the case - then I'm not sure why we're talking about these wake events. They don't trigger anything other than a log message that the machine was waking up (on the off chance it was useful for later diagnostic steps)

[sub]

FYI, NextPVR's recording service has a thread that runs in the background, and every few seconds it looks at it's recording schedule to see if anything is due to start or stop. This runs all the time, and doesn't know or care about wake/sleep events. (the wake timer is just to tell Window's that this would be a good time to make sure the machine is awake)

[sub]

Try setting <WakeupPreRecordingSeconds>to zero. It should minimize the risk of bad luck with your machine just happening to go to sleep immediately before the recording is due to start.

[careads]

I mentioned in my original post that I would try that and so far it appears to be okay, but I understood from a previous post that might also cause problems if NextPVR tried to start the recording before the tuner was ready. It seems like the backup wake-up timer should happen at the pre-padding time, and the main wakeup timer should happen at WakeupPreRecordingSeconds before pre-padding. Maybe that would happen if I switched WakeupPreRecordingSeconds from the default 90 to a multiple of 60? I will check.

[sub]

Most tuners don’t need any startup time, so probably not something you need to worry about.

[careads]

Thanks. I've done a few tests with WakeupPreRecordingSeconds = 0 and haven't had an issue.

I think it is important for us to realize that the issue I had is a little different than the rest of this thread. My issue doesn't have anything to do with going back to sleep quickly after the original recording timer wake-up (the Windows unattended sleep setting). My issue is that if WakeupPreRecordingSeconds > 30 seconds, there is a gap in between the backup wake-up timer and the start of the recording. If the system goes to sleep during that time, the recording will be missed. For me the system went to sleep during that interval because I just happened to have exited NextPVR and stopped using the system 15 minutes before that gap happened. I have a 15 minute idle sleep timer setting.

I think that rather than have the backup wake-up timer 30 seconds after the original timer, it should be scheduled exactly at the beginning of the pre-padding, or sleep should be prevented when there is less than WakeupPreRecordingSeconds before the next recording starts. If not, there's a hole in the algorithm to wake the computer up to make a recording.

FYI, I set WakeupPreRecordingSeconds = 30. The backup wake-up timer happens exactly at the beginning of the recording. My issue shouldn't happen again and most of the time the system will have 30 seconds between wake-up and recording. I think that 30 would be a better default than 90 so that this won't happen to others.

[sub]

I've changed the default value for WakeupPreRecordingSeconds to 30 for the next build.

[careads]

That's good to hear. You guys are awesome! I appreciate your support and the use of NextPVR. I just made a donation.