.ts record/playback problems

[johnsonx42]

I tried a live test of GB-PVR last night, with the wife. I scheduled Dancing with the Stars to record at 8:00pm. We (the wife and I) commenced watching around 8:45 or so. All seemed well for awhile.

Then about 40 minutes in to the show, I couldn't get it seek past the commercials, it would skip around and end up back near where I started trying to seek. No matter what I did, I couldn't move forward in the file any longer. Yes, as far as I could tell it would continue playing ok, but seeking would just keep bouncing back and forth. No, we definitely had not caught up to the live feed, not even close. The Wife was unamused, unimpressed, and uninspired by my great project; I received something of a 'look' as she picked up the TiVo remote...

Further, after we finished watching the show from the DirecTiVo instead, I went back to GB-PVR and found even though the show had ended 40 minutes earlier, GB-PVR still claimed it was recording; the show still showed as Pending rather than Ready. The file itself was 8.79GB and showed the last modified time at 9:32pm (correct, 1:30 show starting at 8:00pm with the default 2 minute pad). I had to restart the recording service to get it to stop - at that point the Recording showed as Ready.

I tried playing back the show from the Recordings menu. Same basic effect, all is ok until in the neighborhood of 40 minutes in. If I'm seeking rapidly, at that point it jumps almost to the end of the recording, and the times on the playbar go crazy - 18+ hours total time, minutes reeling off like seconds. Attempting to seek backwards in the file from there encounters the same looping effect as before, I can go back a little with some effort, but it will often just jump back to near the end again. Sometimes seeking backwards actually goes forwards.

If I start the playback over again from the beginning, and sort of 'sneak' up to the point where it goes nuts, I can slowly seek (ie one button press at a time rather than holding down the button) through that area without it skipping to the end. But the playbar times go nuts, and seeking becomes very difficult and unpredictable (ie, seeking forward often jumps backwards, etc.)

I've thus far not had the patience to just let it play through the troubled area, but I see no evidence that there's any hard wall or disruption in the file where playback would fail.

Then I went back and checked a test recording of 'Armageddon' I had made a couple of nights ago (mostly to see if the machine would wake up from standby at 3am and record - it did). Sure enough, that recording has all the same problems. AFAIK the recording process ended correctly with Armageddon.

Logs are attached, if anything is to be seen there.

[johnsonx42]

Follow up:

I just let the recording of 'Dancing' play through the point where it got fouled up. It plays just fine, no problems at all.

About 10-15 minutes into the problem area (approximately 55 minutes into the program), I hit pause - the playbar was nuts, showing several dozen hours of program length. I tried skipping and seeking; seeking (fast-forward) mostly did nothing, just moved the current position on the play bar back and forth, sometimes made a little progress forward in the file. Skipping worked, but the skips were very short, probably more-or-less proportional to the 'crazy time' showing on the playbar.

When I managed to get to near the end of the program, the play bar jumped again to even more crazy numbers, like hundreds of hours of program time. At that point, it seemed difficult or impossible to go back in the file.

While it is difficult to know for certain, it seems that the first seeking problem occurs at the 4GB point in the file, and the later increase in the problem occurs at the 8GB point in the file. The file is 8.79GB for 90 minutes (I started the recording a little late, so the 1-minute start pad and the first minute or two of the show didn't record), so 4GB would occur around 40 to 45 minutes in.

The 'bad behavior' point in the Armageddon recording also seems to occur at about the 4GB point. That file has a higher data rate, and the problem occurs proportionally sooner, around the 25-30 minute point (total file size for the 3 hour recording is 26GB, so the 25-30 minute range is about 3.6 to 4.3GB)

Perhaps this is a clue to the cause?

[sub]

I've got to get on a plane in a couple of hours. I'll have to look into it when I'm back from my work trip.

[johnsonx42]

Work? What about ME? What about MY needs?

Haha, have a good trip.

[johnsonx42]

just a little additional info, I know you're away sub:

Repeated the live test tonight with the Dancing results show. Same exact thing happened, but more like 44 minutes in. Compared to the file size, that appears again to be just about at the 4GB point. After some fiddling and re-starting playback, I did succeed in skipping the commercials after that point and finished watching the show.

This time the recording did stop on time, but in this case we did not begin watching the recorded show until after it was already stopped. I will test watching another show while it's recording to see if that's what causes it to not stop.

[johnsonx42]

Repeated same problem tonight on my newly built dedicated GB-PVR box. Running Vista this time around, 1.3.7 installed clean, most settings same as before: recording via TS Mux from ATSC tuner, cyberlink decoder (from klite codec pack this time rather than a powerdvd install). Exact same symptoms as original 8GB+ recording: playbar goes nuts at the 4GB point, hard to seek, seeking gets better as I move further along in the recording, playbar goes more nuts at 8GB, at this point I really can't seek at all any more.

Nothing new really, just wanted to bump this and report that the problem continues on a clean build.

I haven't had a repeat of the recording not stopping on time, just that once, though I haven't done all that many scheduled recordings. Most likely it was an unrelated symptom.

[tjb]

Repeated same problem tonight on my newly built dedicated GB-PVR box. Running Vista this time around, 1.3.7 installed clean, most settings same as before: recording via TS Mux from ATSC tuner, cyberlink decoder (from klite codec pack this time rather than a powerdvd install). Exact same symptoms as original 8GB+ recording: playbar goes nuts at the 4GB point, hard to seek, seeking gets better as I move further along in the recording, playbar goes more nuts at 8GB, at this point I really can't seek at all any more.

Nothing new really, just wanted to bump this and report that the problem continues on a clean build.

I haven't had a repeat of the recording not stopping on time, just that once, though I haven't done all that many scheduled recordings. Most likely it was an unrelated symptom.

Just thought I would let you know that you are not the only one with this problem. I have the exact same symptoms with skipping or fast forwarding. It works OK at the beginning of the file, but increasingly gets worse. I should note that this, however, is much better than the last build where the system would hand every time I tried to FF. So progress is being made. Overall, I couldn't be happier with GbPvr and my new client/server setup.

Note: Is it just my setup, or has anyone else noticed that thread email notifications have stopped working since the forums were moved to a new provider?
Edit: Found out that the notifications were going to the spam filter in gmail, so please disregard this note.

[elbryyan]

I scheduled Dancing with the Stars to record at 8:00pm.

I think your problem started here.

I think sub said that on .ts recordings the timebar will show odd times. I would only suggest trying a different decoder to see if you get the same results. I know you can get a trial of the Purevideo decoder to see if that helps. Or try switching to dvr-ms. You won't have the multi-mux or whatever option but it's worth a shot.

[johnsonx42]

I think your problem started here.

I knew that one would come eventually, I'm surprised it took so long. I do enjoy the show, but I doubt I would watch it without wifely influence.

I think sub said that on .ts recordings the timebar will show odd times. I would only suggest trying a different decoder to see if you get the same results. I know you can get a trial of the Purevideo decoder to see if that helps. Or try switching to dvr-ms. You won't have the multi-mux or whatever option but it's worth a shot.

I know the timebar is imperfect with .ts, but I've encountered a bit more specific failure at what appears to be the 4GB point in the file (every file), that also makes seeking/skipping next to impossible. Everything is fine up to that point.

I'm thinking this is something sub can fix (just need bigger variables perhaps?), as I know he wants to improve all aspects of operation with .ts files (from his comments about it, not that I'm claiming to have a vulcan mind meld with him).

I may well consider switching back to DVR-MS for now... I abandoned it because it made channel-changes in Timeshift mode so painfully slow, but even with TS-Mux they aren't quite fast enough for channel surfing either. I'm trying to gain WAF here against some resistance, and slow channel changes look bad (Live Preview is not an option for various reasons, it's got to be timeshift mode)

[lost@c]

I have this problem too. In fact I have observed the end time on the time bar increasing while watching a recording (like it does when watching a program that is still recording). It does seem to be limited to longer recordings and happens after an hour of so through. While watching a recording last night, the time bar end time sat at around 3 hours but by the end, it was saying 25 hours. Skipping worked but to go forward a couple of minutes, I had to put in really high numbers (like 40). FF also went forward but if it was a full second I would be surprised. This gave the impression of not going forward. The TS mux option is well worth persevering with for those of us with limited card slots.