0MB mpg file?

[Trevor]

Another thought occurs. It's possible this could be related to the PVR-150 drivers that I've upgraded to in the past few days (23083 pre-release). With no errors in the logs, 0MB files would be consistent with the card itself freezing up.

To verify this I'll watch for another one of these 0MB file generation times and see if I can watch LiveTV or if I can even watch WinTV2000. If I can't, then it's a driver issue and not a GB-PVR issue.

(I'm assuming my MDB files look as clean and as boring as the logs)

[sub]

Another thought occurs. It's possible this could be related to the PVR-150 drivers that I've upgraded to in the past few days (23083 pre-release).

Certainly possible.

[Trevor]

Argh... Happened again last night.

Here's what I've determined.

1) The Log files dont seem to show anything (thanks to sub for that)
2) The system works fine for perhaps 12-24 hours, and then recordings are all 0MB
3) Even when recordings are broken, Live TV works fine.
4) Stopping GB-PVR's recording service (killing it in the task manager) and restarting it has no effect.
5) Installing 92.8 OVER 92.11 has no effect.
6) Rebooting clears up the problem

Now 1+4+5+6 scream out a problem with the drivers. You should be able to stop and restart an application without rebooting the machine. If GB-PVR is gibbling something at the system level, it may be the driver's fault.

However, #3 seems to indicate it's a GBPVR problem of some sort. If LiveTV is available, why can't it store the file?

So here's my strategy:

I've upgraded to the very latest PVR 150 pre-release drivers, they came out yesterday. 23159 is available at ftp://ftp.shspvr.com/download/wintv-pvr_...rerelease/

I've uninstall/reinstalled 0.92.11 , and left the existing MDB files etc intact. I did however wipe out the old skin and plugin directories. I wasn't executing any plugings, but I'm worried one of them has mangled GB-PVR somehow (XRecord, perhaps?)

If this doesn't work, I'm going to wipe out my GB-PVR dir, and start with a clean install of 0.92.8. Leaving the new drivers

If that does work, I'll try an upgrade back to 0.92.11 and see if the problem occurs again. If not, I'll downgrade my drivers back into remote unhappy land and see if that solves the problem. If I see any really new behaviour, I'll attribute that to the new PVR drivers.

I really hope I can track down what's happening to my system soon. This is a GB-PVR killer.

[Trevor]

Argh! It's still happening. I'm going to attempt a clean downgrade to 0.92.8 now (likely with a fresh directory), just to verify that it's 0.92.11 that's causing the problem.

It's aggravating to troubleshoot this with so little data. Even if the downgrade does work, I'll have no idea what the problem is of it it will reocurr on subsequent versions.

A plea if this does turn out to be the problem. Is there some sort of debug logging mode that I could turn on that would actually indicate "50 megs recorded, 100 megs recorded, 150 megs recorded" as recording events? I'd be happy to test out a debug version of some sort if I can track down this bug. Otherwise this might be a GB-PVR killer for me.

[Trevor]

OK, some closure on this.

I started to realize something was wrong when certain specific shows were not being recorded. Specific shows (that happened to air between 11am and 5pm) ended up as 0MB files, and other shows afterward were just fine.

I upgraded the PVR card drivers with no effect. I eventually did a clean install of 0.92.11, rebuilt up all my recording schedules, and the problem appears to be gone.

I can think of only two possibilities:

1) Something weird with one of the plugins (perhaps RecordX) I installed but didn't use.

2) Something bizzare with the contents of the gbpvr.mdb file (Which I had a look through and didn't see any problems)

Anyways, I appear to be happy now, but am a bit wary of installing plugins for fear they might gibble my system.

I did preserve a copy of the old gbpvr directory (I renamed instead of deleting). Is there any further data I can produce for debugging, or should I simply let this drop and be happy I appear to be working now?

[iwantmypvr]

Did you ever resolve this problem. I started getting 0MB files a couple of days ago. My wife is giving me the "you should have bought a TIVO look".

If it doesn't record "What Not to Wear" tonight, I'm not getting ANY for a week :eek:

[garetmax]

Hey Hey,

I'm getting 0mb files all of a sudden also. It doesn't matter if I reboot though.

Everything looks ok in the logs but everything recorded is 0mb.

I also had a comskip error, but I deleted all comskip files out of there to no effect.

I've reinstalled xrecord, video archiver, and the main program.

Any ideas to help us out?

[Pioneer4x4]

Something else to check is disk system. Since the liveTV and recordings are specified seperately, could there be a permissions problem? What file system is everyone using on their recordings drive that is having this issue? I assume NTFS for larger files, and NTFS can be persnickity on file permissions. Or if is always on a certain time of day, is there any scheduled system tools then, or is the PC not waking up devices properly?

[sub]

Email your logs to me at support@devnz.com and I'll take a look.

Include a link back to this post so I know what the logs are for. Also include some details about what you tried to record.

[Jere_Jones]

Are the shows that end up a 0megs immediately following another recording? I had a similar problem with SageTV. Since Sage monitors the file to make sure it is growing and resets the recording if it isn't, the problem manifested as missing the first 5 minutes of the show. I don't know if GB-PVR does the same thing.

The fix was turning off something called "fast-mux switching". Maybe sub can translate that into GB-PVR terms.

Regardless, what you are experiencing is common among many PVR software suites. I doubt it is GB-PVR's fault.

Jere