System Plugin for nPVR - Early Beta

[imilne]

I'll look into, sure. Hopefully it just needs some try/catch wrappers around the bits throwing a wobbly.

I think it probably started happening with a recent NPVR update, because I seem to remember being able to run the plugin without the recording service running once upon a time. I never used to have it active on my development laptop, but now it has to be.

Iain

[sub]

I think it probably started happening with a recent NPVR update, because I seem to remember being able to run the plugin without the recording service running once upon a time. I never used to have it active on my development laptop, but now it has to be.

In the old days NextPVR.exe used to spin up a local copy of the recording service if it wasnt already running, but this caused recording problems for some users, so its default behavior is to not do this anymore. (it can still be configured to behave that way though)

[johnsonx42]

I'm sure the System Plugin has always required a recording service to be running, but as sub points out NextPVR.exe used to launch one on it's own. I'm referring to the case where whatever recording service there is has crashed (though simply not having it running should be an equivalent case). The System Plugin is the only available way to reboot a system with the remote, which is primarily necessary if the recording service has crashed, but in that condition the System Plugin can't be accessed.

[imilne]

Yep, you're both right. I'd forgotten all about the local copy of the recording service.

Seeing as you're reading sub, is there a suitable check for testing for the availability of the service via the API? At the moment, it looks like it's crapping out on the attempt to read the server status (IScheduleHelper.GetServerStatus()) which also takes it a few seconds to time out. Weirdly, other code - iterations over CaptureSources and ScheduledRecordings for instance - don't seem to cause an error. Maybe the API just returns empty lists in these cases.

I can always just catch the errors and fail gracefully of course, but perhaps there's a better way?

Edit: it now dawns on me that CaptureSource and ScheduledRecording data would come from the database, not the recording service. Doh.

Iain

[sub]

Edit: it now dawns on me that CaptureSource and ScheduledRecording data would come from the database, not the recording service. Doh.

Yep. You'd probably have to do a try/catch around the server status.

[imilne]

Can you make it so the plugin still works partially if the Recording Service has crashed? Primarily I'd like to still be able to access the Reboot function; last time I tried if the recording service is down it just gets a .net error and returns to the main menu.

This should be fixed now in the latest version.

* Focus will now return to the buttons after switching away from the list view
* The plugin will now warn (and not crash) if the recording service is not available
* Fixed an issue with pending recordings (for programmes where the recording is not yet active) showing negative times

There's also a silent exception that's generated if it can't talk to the database in a client setup where the server can't be reached, but everything else in NPVR will be hosed in that scenario so I doubt it's worth putting in any error handling for.

Iain

[johnsonx42]

nice. I'm expecting a recording service crash soon (Tuesday morning I think), so I'll look forward to testing it. Thanks Iain.