"failed because recording service not running" but records OK?

[dazzaxjr]

Another follow up to earlier problem. Thanks to subs patch nrecord.exe no longer crashes on recording.

I've let things run for a few days now and am seeing a recurring issue with recording being listed with the above error even though they seem to have recorded OK. These shows are also still listed in the pending list so it looks like npvr has got stuck even though recordings are being made in the background.

Examples from today are Smallville, Warehouse 13, and the simpsons, but programs either side of these, Family Guy, and Doctor Who recorded and were listed correctly in whats new.

Attached logs if that helps.
Thanks, Darrell.

[sub]

A couple of other people mentioned this, but I've not been able to reproduce it so far. I'll take a look through the log a little later today.

[johnsonx42]

I just got this myself, for EVERY recording scheduled today. They all recorded fine, are perfectly playable when accessed through Videos. But they all show as Failed - "Recording service not running at recording time".

The exact sequence of events may help. I came home late this evening after being out all day. I first noticed that none of the recordings for today were listed in Ready or What's New, rather they still showed as Pending. I didn't start looking into it right away, as my wife wanted to watch the episode of House that had recorded fine yesterday (my first day of using NPVR). So we watched that, then deleted it at 11:48pm. As soon as we deleted it, suddenly all the missed recordings showed up as Failed and disappeared from Pending. I'd seen this thread before though, so I checked the recording files via Videos and they were all fine.

This is all shown in the in most recent NRecord.log, at 23:48 on June 26th. The successful recording of the shows in question appears in the NRecord.log.1.

Also interesting is that the NPVR log doesn't show anything happening after 14:21 today, yet we used NPVR this evening obviously. I even closed NPVR to make sure it flushed and closed the log file, and all it wrote at the end was "Exiting... Done."

[johnsonx42]

Ok, I think I figured out what the cause of this is... it explains the NVPR log being empty at least, so it may have something to do with the larger issue as well:

I discovered that NPVR will let me launch multiple instances of it. Once a 2nd (or more) instance is launched, none of them write to the NPVR.log any longer. I don't know exactly how this would explain the recordings being marked failed though when they did in fact record, but perhaps it has something to do with the way NextPVR.EXE will launch an in-process recording service if it doesn't see one running already; perhaps then that resulted in multiple copies of the recording service running as well.

The Green button on my MCE remote is set up to launch NextPVR.exe (as it was with PVRX2.exe before) so it would have been easy to get two copies running by accident, and in hindsight I think there were in fact 2 copies running last night because it acted 'weird' when I tried to close it, and I had to close it again.

We need a setting to disable multiple instances of NextPVR.exe. Even if I'm way off base and multiple instances isn't actually a problem, I still don't to be able to launch more than one anyway.

[Reddwarf]

Ok, I think I figured out what the cause of this is... it explains the NVPR log being empty at least, so it may have something to do with the larger issue as well:

I discovered that NPVR will let me launch multiple instances of it. Once a 2nd (or more) instance is launched, none of them write to the NPVR.log any longer. I don't know exactly how this would explain the recordings being marked failed though when they did in fact record, but perhaps it has something to do with the way NextPVR.EXE will launch an in-process recording service if it doesn't see one running already; perhaps then that resulted in multiple copies of the recording service running as well.

The Green button on my MCE remote is set up to launch NextPVR.exe (as it was with PVRX2.exe before) so it would have been easy to get two copies running by accident, and in hindsight I think there were in fact 2 copies running last night because it acted 'weird' when I tried to close it, and I had to close it again.

We need a setting to disable multiple instances of NextPVR.exe. Even if I'm way off base and multiple instances isn't actually a problem, I still don't to be able to launch more than one anyway.

I'v had this problem for some time now, and I'm pretty sure I'v never had more that one instance of NextPVR running. But it could make sense that NextPVR somtimes don't see Nrecord.exe running and then launches the internal version of nrecord. All the recordings I'v had marked as "failed because Nrecord was not running" has been fine and playable via Videos.

[johnsonx42]

just an update, I've continued to have this problem and have been very careful not to have any extra instance of NextPVR.exe running, so apparently that has nothing to do with it (though that should still be fixed). So far since the first group of recordings that worked ok the first day, I've only had one that actually shows up properly in the recordings list... all the others show Failed, but are fine when accessed through Videos.

[sub]

If you can post your npvr.log and nrecord.log, I'll see if I can see the cause.

[johnsonx42]

Look at my previous post (#3 in this thread) for logs from yesterday. I've got nothing for today's occurances. I had to reboot the box, and when the recording service started up again it started a new log without rolling the previous log down to .log.1

[Streams]

I have this exact same problem with the odd recording saying "failed because recording service was not running" but the ts file is complete and where it should be.

I also find that if npvr is open at the time of recording the recording wont go from pending to ready without restarting npvr (not the recording service, just the gui).

[sub]

I thought you were possibly correct that it might related to a local copy of the recording service being spun up, but thats definitely not the case in that npvr.log.

At this stage I'm not really sure what to suggest.