New Problem - Zombie Recording

[andrewj]

Hi,
I managed two clean recordings from BBC4 late last night, so the problem is intermittent.
For the record, here's my system details:

NPVR 4.0.5
Intel i7 Quad Core 920 @ 2.67GHz (old but gold), 14GB RAM
Nvidia Geforce GTX 960
2x Hauppage WinTV-DualHD
Windows Ultimate 7-64

Andrew

[ALG]

I asked about the tuner because having read the other forums, it could well be an issue with the drivers for specific products that is the cause. I have BBC4 HD on COM8 and BBC News HD on COM7 (Winter Hill) and aren't seeing the problems you guys are experiencing.
There's nothing in your logs to suggest anything excessive in the EPG data and it looks pretty similar to mine in terms of overall quantity of channels/programmes being OTA downloaded.
The move from MHEG to HbbTV isn't likely to be the issue as I believe the HbbTV data will be transmitted on all muxes.

In the end if we believe there is something specific causing a problem in the COM7 or COM8 stream, then we may need to capture a whole stream sample for SUB to take a look at.

Thanks Bobins
Interesting, HbbTV was a suspect.

I've captured 15 seconds of com 7 570MHZ From Crystal Palace and opened it with DemuxToy Lite and attached the report, don't know if this is of any use.


Andrew

[andrewj]

Hi,
I've just had another Zombie recording - I now have a 10 hour version of "Fire and Ice..." from BBC4 last night. The behaviour seems to be that recordings on BBC4 work OK if there's nothing else recording, but fail if there are any overlapping recordings on any channel, although I admit that this could be a coincidence.

Slightly different system behaviour on this occasion. There's nothing in the Windows event logs, whereas previously there's been a memory-related exception for NRecord.exe, and I couldn't stop it by simply stopping the NPVR Recording service - NDigitalHost resisted that and I had to use TaskKill to kill it.

This is quite a serious problem, with the potential to crash my whole system by filling up the disk. NPVR really should handle the exception and at least make sure the affected recording stops. However the logs (Nrecord.log.3) show the usual out of memory exception at about 22.00 last night.

Can this be fixed, or do I just have to avoid BBC4 HD?
Thanks
Andrew

[sub]

Can this be fixed, or do I just have to avoid BBC4 HD?

At this stage I've got very little to go on. I don't suppose you got a c:\temp\crash.mdmp when this happened?

[andrewj]

Hi,
No, as per previous exchanges I'm not getting a .mdmp file. Is there any way to force one?
Can I set a higher logging level on the system somehow, which might give you a more detailed trace?
Andrew

[mvallevand]

I have done various things on the system today Process Explorer reports that I'm only using 3.8GB, which leaves ~10GB spare.

How much is NextPVR using before you restart? Since it is 32 bit it can't use all that RAM.

Martin

[andrewj]

At this stage I've got very little to go on. I don't suppose you got a c:\temp\crash.mdmp when this happened?

Hi @Sub
I've just found the attached, which looks like it came from the problem last Saturday. However I'm suspicious that it might not be useful for two reasons:
1. It appears to have zero length
2. When the BBC4 recording suffered the memory error, it in turn crashed a recording on BBC1. I suspect it's the latter which generated this

Please have a look and see if it helps.

XXX Update - file has zero length and won't upload, so that doesn't help. Sorry!

Otherwise this bug is clearly not generating any dump files. Is there anything else we can do to get you some usable diagnostics? (It happened again last night, so it is reproducible.)
Thanks
Andrew

[tassiekev]

Hello all

I'm a real newbie at this so please forgive any errors. I am using an HP G4 pentium with a Win quad tuner and have been for the last 12 months or so. Everything was working fine until a couple of weeks ago when I started getting recordings that went for hours and hours. Just last night the second Modus Episode on BBC4 was still running at 10:40 this morning (39GB) - the first recorded OK, an episode of Fire & Ice ran to 27GB before I stopped it. The PC isn't used for anything else - files are xferred to an i7 for conversion to MP4. I can download from iPlayer but then lose the surround sound. Only BBC4 seems to be affected.

Thanks to all for your efforts in solving this problem.

[andrewj]

Hello all

I'm a real newbie at this so please forgive any errors. I am using an HP G4 pentium with a Win quad tuner and have been for the last 12 months or so. Everything was working fine until a couple of weeks ago when I started getting recordings that went for hours and hours. Just last night the second Modus Episode on BBC4 was still running at 10:40 this morning (39GB) - the first recorded OK, an episode of Fire & Ice ran to 27GB before I stopped it. The PC isn't used for anything else - files are xferred to an i7 for conversion to MP4. I can download from iPlayer but then lose the surround sound. Only BBC4 seems to be affected.

Thanks to all for your efforts in solving this problem.

This is exactly the same problem as I and Andy have reported. It seems to be specific to BBC4 HD. Thanks for the additional evidence.

Could you please check your temp directory (should be C:\Temp) and see if you have a crashdump file, typically crash.mdmp. If so please upload for Sub to have a look.

Thanks
Andrew

[gEd]

Hello all

I'm a real newbie at this so please forgive any errors. I am using an HP G4 pentium with a Win quad tuner and have been for the last 12 months or so. Everything was working fine until a couple of weeks ago when I started getting recordings that went for hours and hours. Just last night the second Modus Episode on BBC4 was still running at 10:40 this morning (39GB) - the first recorded OK, an episode of Fire & Ice ran to 27GB before I stopped it. The PC isn't used for anything else - files are xferred to an i7 for conversion to MP4. I can download from iPlayer but then lose the surround sound. Only BBC4 seems to be affected.

Thanks to all for your efforts in solving this problem.

Hi and welcome to the community!
The good news is that you are not alone...
I just noticed that I had some failed recordings and saw that my disk was full due to a 2 x BBC4 recordings that hadn't stopped. One orf them was Top of the tops, the same as ALG reported in post #7.
It looks like there's a problem with NPVR working nicely with this channel, possibly related to when BBC4 moved frequency recently.

For people who are experiencing this problem, what transmitter are you tuning to. (I'm on crystal palace)

We need to help Sub to troubleshoot the issue. Sub, any thoughts on what we can do to help you to isolate the problem?