Another black screen on live tv

[fluffykeith]

I did search the forum but there are lots of black screen problems - I'm not sure if mine is related or not.

Everything was looking ok - I could select a channel to watch from the guide - great.

Now I select the channel to watch and I get a blank screen, not picture or sound. (except for the main menu burnt-in on my plasma - can the menu contrast be reduced?!).

I get blank screens for all channels now - I had a selection of blanks and some working at one point but now they are all gone.

Tried a reboot, tried restart recording service (which had fixed things before).

I'm on XP 32bit. GBPVR used to be ok but now things have moved on is this the case of I have to upgrade to win7 to keep up with a working system?

I'll try and grab some logs later - but if there are any "oh yes this is fixed by xyz" quick solutions then that would be great. (missus is giving me the "why did you upgrade it - it worked before" grilling).

Keith

[sub]

Its almost certainly related to the decoders you're using, but reproduce the problem then zip and attach the npvr.log and nrecord.log and we'll take a look.

[fluffykeith]

Hi Sub

Happened again and now I have added a set of logs.

The events were:
I set a recording for Tom Jones on BBC4 22/09/2012 02.15 start I think end at 03.00
I cancelled a Monk recording and tried live tv on BBC4 and another channel. Played ok.
Went to bed - got up!!
The recording of Tom Jones got truncated after about 45s
Also a further recording just show black screeen - rubarb and custard I think on one of the childrens channels CBBC maybe.
Log shows some exceptions occuring for both recodings.
Also the channel does not play anymore - others do, but BBC4 does not and I guess CBBC wont but didnt try it.

Thanks for looking into it.

cheers
Keith

[sub]

Hi Sub

Happened again and now I have added a set of logs.

The events were:
I set a recording for Tom Jones on BBC4 22/09/2012 02.15 start I think end at 03.00
I cancelled a Monk recording and tried live tv on BBC4 and another channel. Played ok.
Went to bed - got up!!
The recording of Tom Jones got truncated after about 45s
Also a further recording just show black screeen - rubarb and custard I think on one of the childrens channels CBBC maybe.
Log shows some exceptions occuring for both recodings.
Also the channel does not play anymore - others do, but BBC4 does not and I guess CBBC wont but didnt try it.

Thanks for looking into it.

cheers
Keith

This had problems because you tried to do the recording in the middle of the overnight DVB EPG update, which was using the same tuner.

This is a known issue. For now you need to be careful to avoid doing recordings when the epg update is occurring. For most people 2am is pretty safe, but obviously it wasn't for you in this case. I intend to fix it, but unfortunately it's not so straight forward.

[fluffykeith]

ok - thanks for looking into it.

Is it part of the issue that channel then becomes un-useable, ie, it stays blacked out until I restart the PC. It seems to lock out the channel permanently, possibly the whole card as I am sure channels were ending up black even though I had no recordings associated with them.
It may also be messing up the database as I try to delete failed recordings and it throws an exception.

I will remove the epg from the sat channels as I intend to merge them to DVB-T channels, that may help a bit.

cheers
Keith

[fluffykeith]

I also get black screens it the following condition.

start to watch channel
go back to tv guide
start to watch channel again - black screen

only some channels but it explains some failed recordings, I watch the channel, then it attemps to record that channel and I get black screen.
Sometimes the recording sows black on first playing and then shows the program on a second playing.
It seems that something is not being reset or released.

I'll try and capture some logs but it's looking a bit sad

[sub]

You'd have to post the logs showing the scenario.

[fluffykeith]

Just changed renderer to wmr9 fse for wmr9 custom and the black channel now plays.

Would the renderer affect the recordings?

[whurlston]

It would only affect the playback of recordings, not the recordings themselves.

[fluffykeith]

I'm not sure if I have more than one problem here or not.

ndigtalhost keeps crashing. It's something to do with tuning one of the satelite receivers. It seems to occur each morning, presumably during epg scanning and also occurs whenever I try to watch a channel that I know is only on the sat.
It could be related to the failed recordings I am getting as although I can watch a given channel it is not necessarily the case that its the same tuner that will be doing a subsequent recording.

I just watched a few channels - I think the last was create&craft (not my ususal viewing but its on sat!). Should be near the ends of the logs.

Hope you can locate something.

cheers

Keith