Recording artefacts

[ringorinfret]

Hi,

I have been a long time NPVR user, since a few months I started to have a strange issue, recordings would get all kind of artefacts, frame skipping and sound cutting. It looks like bad reception from antenna but reception is actually ok.

This morning I did a test recording 4 programs at a time to see if I could reproduce the problem, at first everything was smooth, I was watching channel 2-2 while recording the same channel + 3 others. everything was perfect. then around 8:30am it started happening, live tv was stutering all of a sudden.

I stopped all recordings and went back "live" and all that was now gone, everything was playing great again 

I think I pinpointed the problem to be happening when either a recording has been running for over an hour or so because it mostly happens around 1h + into a recording, 
looking at logs (i am ignorant of all this stuff) it looks like also other devices in my house are requesting an epg update which seems to coincide with the problems...but I am not sure... could it be the problem ?

I have a rpi3b+ running kodi and a T95Z android box which are always turned on, I was testing from a windows10 pc running kodi 18.6 (all devices have that version)

Please note I had this problem on the latest v4.xx version and upgraded to v5.xx in hope of fixing this issue but it is still there

sorry for the poor explanations, let me know what else I should provide

[mvallevand]

Logs are always needed as the first step. Also include the debug kodi logs from the machine you are viewing on.

To answer your questions yes getting lists can but load on the device and on the network and if you are recording 4 shows even all that logging could stress the hard drive.

Martin

[ringorinfret]

Yes I was trying to push it with 4 recordings, which was not the case when I last had this problem on sunday night, was recording a 2h30 show and at around 1h30 into the show i started having problems to the point it was unwatchable , unfortunately I didnt keep the logs at that time.

I am sorry I thought I had attached logs to my original post, will try to provide them

thanks

---- edit----

I dont have the kodi logs, however the problem is in the recording file itself, any player playing the TS file (either kodi or vlc) will get the problem.
Might be related to "comskip" parallel processing which I will disable for a while and see if the problem still occurs

[mvallevand]

Ok I see the logs now. You had four comskips running in parallel processing when live tv started what kind of performance do you expect.

As a minimum I would modify your batch file not to spew comskip data to the NextPVR logs by adding the > NULL to the line.

Martin

[ringorinfret]

Ok I see the logs now.  You had four comskips running in parallel processing when live tv started what kind of performance do you expect.

As a minimum I would modify your batch file not to spew comskip data to the NextPVR logs by adding the > NULL to the line.

Martin

Yes like I said I was trying to "push" my hardware , everything was smooth until 8:30am when I started experiencing problems that were similar to the problems I had in the previous weeks. 

Normally this kind of problem was happening at "random" , I would be recording only 1 show and viewing another channel for example, that was the typical scenario. Or recording a show and then later starting to watch the beginning of the recorded show while it was still recording, I never have 4 shows recording at the same time.

I will do another test now that I disabled comskip altogether and see if it might be related.

My feeling is like something is "building up" and at some point the capture card is not functioning properly and creating artefacts in the signal received, even though i never have reception issues when watching tv live through kovi/npvr

thanks for looking into it , i am just annoyed that I am not able to watch my recorded shows when that happen. I used to record on an old core duo PC and never had this kind of problems even with comskip enabled. now that pc has died and I moved my npvr recording server to a i5-4590 with 16 go of ram. this should be plenty , hdd for recordings is the same as before (internal SATA).

[mvallevand]

When recordings end there is a notification sent to all you connected devices and the tray app to get recording and timer updates so there is a huge spike in disk activity going on with live tv, comskip, logging etc. and the disk head must be going crazy. If disabling comskip helps maybe try enabling it with the redirected stdout.

I don't understand this statement "even though i never have reception issues when watching tv live through kovi/npvr" because that is the issue you are reporting.

Martin

[ringorinfret]

When recordings end there is a notification sent to all you connected devices and the tray app to get recording and timer updates so there  is a huge spike in disk activity going on with live tv, comskip, logging etc. and the disk head must be going crazy.  If disabling comskip helps maybe try enabling it with the redirected stdout. 

I  don't understand this statement "even though i never have reception issues when watching tv live through kovi/npvr" because that is the issue you are reporting.

Martin

Sorry I was not clear, I meant when there is no recording going on