Unable to reliably get HD chanels

[ga_mueller]

Comcast would change just a few channels every week, rather than all at once. Drove me crazy.

Yeah. Took two months here. But pretty painless because we mostly watched locals, and they stayed MPEG-2.

[Will Pittenger]

Still having problems with this.

[sub]

You'll probably need to look at the HDHomeRun config utility while it's attempting one of these failed recordings to see what it's recording - like the channel is marked copy-once, or not locked, or the cable card is having an issue, etc.

[Will Pittenger]

HDHomeRun is Ceton? I'm using a Ceton InfiniTV 6 PCIe.

[sub]

The Ceton equivalent then. They have a web server on the device, and you're able to view information about what each tuner is up to etc.

(I read "CableCard" and assumed HDHomeRun, since this is what just about everyone is using for CableCard)

[Will Pittenger]

I'm looking at that page for tuner 1. I don't see any relevant fields for a channel I know causes problems. There is a "Copy Protection" field on the overall status for the tuner which is set to "Copy Free". But that's an all channel value. Should I check the other 5 tuners?

[Graham]

Should I check the other 5 tuners?

It's not about the tuner ... it's about the channel.

Have NextPVR record a show on a channel that is a problem. View the Ceton webpage while the recording is in progress to see if the Ceton reports any issues.

[Will Pittenger]

For the moment, I can't reproduce it, even on the channnel that previously reliably had the problem. But I doubt it's gone. Recently a show on another channel stopped recording early. Something is going on.

[Will Pittenger]

After a lot more failures, I've concluded the problem only occurs for a few seconds at a time. In one case, when I saw a show (in that case, a 480i show) failed to record, I was able to switch to the channel that would've been recorded before the show in question was scheduled to end. The channel played live just fine. So I suspect even a few seconds is enough to cause NextPVR to give up recording the show. At times, roughly 1/3 of the shows either fail to record at all (a file of 0 bytes is created) or the NextPVR stopped recording early, but still managed to record part of the show.

Maybe NextPVR shouldn't give up so readily.

[sub]

I suspect it's more of a case of some specific behaviour of the Ceton device. NextPVR will wait for the entire time of the recording for data to be delivered. Most devices will resume sending data after a signal outage is restored, and the recording will happily continue. Maybe the Ceton doesn't do this, and just gives up.