Recording service crashing daily

[DETurner]

I have been encountering a problem on an almost daily basis lately: during the first half hour of my nightly recordings, the recording service crashes and will not restart unless I 1.) kill all GBPVR processes in task manager, or 2) reboot. This used to happen once or twice a week, but it's happened three nights running now.:confused:

I first started having this problem when I switched from cable TV to satellite and installed ATSC tuner cards to receive the local broadcast channels I used to be able to get from the cable feed without a decoder box. I am wondering if a temporary loss of signal from the ATSC card might be causing the problem?

Here's my specs:
GBPVR 0.99.5
AMD Athlon 64 3400+
Windows XP Pro (SP2)
2 GB RAM
2x250GB SATA Striped RAID array for recordings
AVerTVHD MCE A180 (2) for OTA ATSC
WinTV PVR 150 MCE for Satellite feed
WinTV PVR 250 for OTA analog & composite input

I have attached the most recent logs.

Any help would be appreciated.

[sub]

Is there any messages listed in the Windows Event Viewer for these crashes?

The only issue I'm aware of that can cause the recording service to crash is described here: http://forums.gbpvr.com/showpost.php?p=1...ostcount=2 but I cant see the tell tail signs of this in your logs.

[DETurner]

There are three events noted in the Windows Event Viewer:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Service Control Manager
Event Category: None
Event ID: 7034
Date: 2/21/2007
Time: 7:36:49 PM
User: N/A
Computer: HOMEBUILT
Description:
The GB-PVR Recording Service service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this 1 time(s).

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
---------------------------------------------
Event Type: Information
Event Source: Service Control Manager
Event Category: None
Event ID: 7035
Date: 2/21/2007
Time: 7:37:49 PM
User: HOMEBUILT\Dad
Computer: HOMEBUILT
Description:
The GB-PVR Recording Service service was successfully sent a start control.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
-------------------------------------------------------
Event Type: Information
Event Source: Service Control Manager
Event Category: None
Event ID: 7036
Date: 2/21/2007
Time: 7:37:50 PM
User: N/A
Computer: HOMEBUILT
Description:
The GB-PVR Recording Service service entered the stopped state.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

[sub]

I dont really know. There isnt any decent clues in there.

Does a file get created in c:\windows\minidump when this occurs?

[DETurner]

There are three files in the c:\windows\minidump folder, but none of them correlate to the crash times. I'm thinking it's related to reception problems. I had some time to tinker with things this afternoon, and I'm having trouble receiving all the channels I should. I was also watching the recording files in Windows Explorer during recording, and they aren't growing at the rate they should (dropouts?) and one of the recordings started a new file three different times wit "-2", "-2-1" and "-2-1-2" extensions added to the filename. (It also just crashed again, but it successfully restarted this time. This might be because I turned off the MediaMVP server.) My antenna is in my attic, and there's still some snow/ice on the roof from last week's storms, so my reception is less than optimal. Tomorrow I'l try relocating the antenna to a higher spot in the attic and see if things improve.

[roy]

I'm also having this problem. I recently replaced a PVR150 with an HVR1600. Analog recording works fine, but I often get failed recordings and recording service lockup caused by ATSC recording. It seems to me trying to record a low signal (<65?) is when there are problems.

Attached are two sets of logs from tonight (it's snowing outside now). Lockup happened at 23:09 with Charlie Rose. I don't get any files in minidump. Is there something to turn on in Windows so that minidump file will get created?

[sub]

You could try running with <BDAUsePsiParser>false</BDAUsePsiParser> set in config.xml for a while to see if it helps. You'll need to remember to set it back to 'true' if you need to do a channel scan.

[roy]

You could try running with <BDAUsePsiParser>false</BDAUsePsiParser> set in config.xml for a while to see if it helps.

This seems to work. When the signal is lost, it is requested again without locking up. Logs attached. When this occurs, it does create a bad recording that causes auto convert to lockup on the file, but it doesn't affect other recordings.

[sub]

This seems to work. When the signal is lost, it is requested again without locking up. Logs attached. When this occurs, it does create a bad recording that causes auto convert to lockup on the file, but it doesn't affect other recordings.

The Cyberlink Mux is reknowned for not handling ATSC transmission errors nicely. You're probably best to just leave your recordings as DVR-MS, otherwise I dont really have any suggestions for you (I doubt Cyberlink are going to fix it for us).

[DETurner]

...My antenna is in my attic, and there's still some snow/ice on the roof from last week's storms, so my reception is less than optimal. Tomorrow I'l try relocating the antenna to a higher spot in the attic and see if things improve.

I finally had the opportunity to move the antenna to a higher location, but reception was still poor. Then I discovered that the antenna amplifier had come unplugged.:o Once I plugged it back in, reception was great. The good news is that I now receive three more digital channels, and my analog reception has also greatly improved.

I also tried the suggestion posted by Sub in #7, above, which did improve Recording Service stability, so I'll probably leave things as they are.

As for transcoding, I gave up some time ago on the Cyberlink Mulltiplexer and even Auto-Conversion. If I want to watch something using MediaMVP, I use other utilities to convert the dvr-ms files to MPEG-2, otherwise I just watch the dvr-ms recording on my computer.