Computer freezes

[hasso]

Finally got v0.90 working and attempted to schedule overnight back to back movies on the same channel. This morning I found the computer frozen at the precise time the second movie was to start recording. Upon reboot the recording menu showed the first movie properly recorded, but the second one indicated "failed". Coincidence? Anybody else had/having this problem? Never had happened before with previous GB-PVR versions.

[lippo]

Can this be related to the freezing while watching liveTV? After skipping one or two channels my computer freezes totally (win2k sp4, hauppauge pvr-350, compag sff p3-600, 512mb). Skipping channels also stops the previous recording and starts a new one. I cleanly installed the last 0908 version. Works good so far, except for the livetv bug.

[hasso]

Nope.. don't think they are related. I don't use Live TV at all because of the bug you mentioned. And the freezing between consecutive recordings never happened until I used v0.9. I'll be trying it again over the weekend to see if this is recurring or maybe just a one-time coincidence.

[hasso]

I defrag regularly now, but haven't moved LiveTV buffer off the C drive (but will do). As mentioned, this only happened when I scheduled and recorded back to back movies. No Live TV was involved. First movie recorded OK, second failed, computer hardfroze (requiring reboot) at exactly the time the second movie was to start recording.

[lippo]

I only have one harddisc in the system (keeping noise levels down). It has a 8gig partition for system and gbpvr. the swapfile is also on this partition.
A second partition (drive d) is 72 gigs. It holds tv recordings and the live-tv buffer. Both are NTFS partitions. C has a standard cluster size. the d-drive has 64K blocks (for highest throughput).
My swapfile is 1024MB fixed. The computer has 512MB internal memory, so there is not much swapping to do. Memory usage is about 150MB with GBPVR running.
I also tried diabling the write cache on the HD, but is freezes instantly (first switching of channels).

[capone]

What do you suggest for this: I have two drives, an 80 and a 200. I use the 80 for os, apps, and live tv. I use the 200 for recording.

I had the cache set to the top (4096) and on C:. I'm going to try setting down to your recomendaiton. Would you still move the cache to D if you use to record?

I guess I could move live to D, but I wanted to keep the pool of free space for recording open. I also suppose that what live uses is dumped periodically, anyway. I could always use C just to store vids (kept recordings, etc).

[ejr]

I've had similar problems.  I am going to run some more tests and maybe even do a clean install, as well as try the defragging and moving the LiveTV and swapfiles.

However, I have a theory that this lockup is due to the GBPVR recording service not stopping properly after a recording is complete.  This is because I have seen other problems, such as when I try to schedule a new recording for a later time, either while recording a show or using timeshift liveTV, I get a message saying that the  device actively refused the connection.  However, the requested recording is put in the pending group.  If I quit, stop the recording service, then restart it, (or reboot) I don't get the problematic message when scheduling a recording from the guide, because the recording service is then definitely off.  

With a back-to-back recording, one recording has to stop so the next one can start.  If it never stops, the next one can't start, and there will be a failure.  In fact, if you check the status of the recording service (right click on the GBPVR icon in the system tray) you might see that it thinks it is still recording the previous show (that's what I saw).

This may be related to freezing while skipping channels when watching liveTV if you are in timeshift mode, since, as it was said, each time you change a channel you stop a recording of a previous channel and start a new recording for the new channel.   If you can't stop the previous one, there might be a lockup.

I think there was some mention in the changelog about changes to stopping the recording service, so this may be where the problem is.

I have a Hauppauge 150, 866 PIII

[capone]

Tweaki lets you set the MFT higher, but I'm not sure why you would. The recomendation is to set it high if you have a large number of files. I have a web design company, so I a lot of small files (77k on just the drive for web conent, most < 50k), and mine is set to 50% of free space. For a small number of large files, they recoomend the default of 12%.

[capone]

Free pagefile defrag: http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freewa...frag.shtml

A bunch of tools you may appreciate for tweaking: http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/utilities.shtml