Computer locking up on recording but recordings seem to keep going.

[erik]

Well with my last test the machine did lockup. I am firmly in belief that it is comskip that is causing the problem. I took comskip out of the GBPVR directory and two shows recorded back to back without padding on high ,perfectly. Which is a shame I love comskip. Which comskip does run correctly on recordings made where they have nothing following them. Commercials are found and all I thought that I saw a way to have comskip run on your shows via a batch file or something does anyone have a tut for that then I could have it set to run at 3am or something and life will be good. Or maybe I should try showanalyzer. Anyone have other ideas?

There is something called comskip monitor that you maybe can run from a scheduled batch file.
Search the forum.

[divinehammer]

I could not find comskip monitor here but I did find it over at the Sagetv forums thanks. I will give it a shot before I try my app.

[divinehammer]

Okay so this locking up business has started again. Now why would it run great for a week or so and the all of the sudden lock up with out any changes also it locks up only with comskip installed. Here is my assumption, Comskip is borkingon a fragmented or smaller HDD , I am not for sure but I think that I defragged and it was working great for a while and then now it is messing up again. i am defragging now and we will see how that goes for a while. I am betting this is the solution. Others are not having this problem becuase they have larger drives or are defragging pretty regularly would be my guess. Or they do not keep many shows on their disk. Anyone elsefind this to be a problem? Thanks.

[erik]

Comskip is doing a couple of things to your computer.
It is realy heating the CPU and it excercises your hard disk.
Did you check the temperature of your CPU?

[divinehammer]

really you think so. you think that the CPU is overheating. I dont think it should do that or else it would lock up every time Comskip ran and it worked great for a bit then when they drive got fragmented it crapped out. I will have to check the temp of the CPU where can I see that at do I have to go into the bios? I hope you are being serious I am not trying to knock comskip I think it is great. I just want to be able to set it and forget it. I am going to install perfect disk soon on this drive. Also I think that if I had a bigger drive I would not have as many problems. I am running on a 1.6a p4 if it matters with a huge sink and fan, but the box is tight so maybe there is no flow.

[erik]

No, I don't think, but there has never been any reason why Comskip has been crashing any PC except for some CPUs oveheating and bad memory (Comskip uses a lot of memory)
There are some programs that can report the CPU temperature. MBM5 (motherboard monitor) is one, .

[divinehammer]

Well after defrag I have recorded probably 6 shows and they all work as expected with comskip. I plan to upgrade the memory on it a bit this weekend just because but I think it was the fragmentation that was causing the problem.

[erik]

Good to hear!

[86atc250r]

FWIW - I had an issue with comskip develop on my machine.

Turns out, the CPU heatsink had collected enough dust that it was no longer as effective as it needed to be.

Was causing all sorts of problems when comskip would run as well as some other problems at various times. A quick cleaning resolved the problem

[divinehammer]

Well I have been monitoring this situation for some time now and I think that I found the culprit it wasnt defrag either. It seems that if in your XP clock you have the automatic time sync checked. IT was causing GBPVR and XP to lockup with the only remedy being a reboot. Specifically it was checking time.nist.gov. I only discovered this when it locked while I was watching a show. W32time errors showed in the events at the exact same time. I unchecked it I have been running smoothly for several days. Even with an 80% full hard drive. I will make a new thread if this seems to be the problem seems like this freezing issue comes up alot so users should check it out.