Recordings fail after a few seconds

[MadBeggar]

Hi all,

I have a strange thing happening but haven't been able to troubleshoot it yet :
I have a recording set for a weekly show on an IPTV channel.
The recording apparently starts with no issues, but it seems to stop after a few seconds/minutes.
NextPVR still says its recording but the ts file does not increase in size.
I've tried waiting for the recording to end just to make sure it wasnt been spooled elsewhere and then dumped into the ts file at the end, but no luck there either.

The setup is as follows :
Running on Debian 10 linux - Kernel 4.19
Used the .deb helper for install
Using vanilla config.xml
IPTV only (no tuner cards) - Using M3U file for channel info and xmltv file for EPG

Live TV works fine on all channels, including the one I'm trying to record on.
If I launch a recording manually on that channel, that works fine as well.

Even stranger : The show I'm recording is replayed a 6 hours later... so when the first recording failed, I simply deleted it. The scheduler is set to record any occurence to it tried to record the same episode a few hours later but it also failed again (ts file stopped growing after 7mb)
I've looked though every log I could find, both in /var/opt/nextpvr and journalctl but had no luck there... there didnt seem to much in the logs in fact.

Is there a way to increase the verbosity of logs somewhere ? 
Out of desperation I currently opted to stop the service and run "/opt/dotnet/dotnet /opt/nextpvr/system/NextPVRServer.dll" manually while redirecting the stdout output to a log file I could look into later.
I've got the same show scheduled to record in a couple of hours and am hoping to capture something there.

To be clear, the machine has plenty of disk space and ram. There are no particular indications of OOM or any other crash information in dmesg (or any other log I could find for that matter).

I'm admit to being at a bit of a loss .... any tips will be greatly appreciated :-)

Thanks

MB

[mvallevand]

Sub added verbose logging for IPTV for the next build. stdout won't help.

Martin

[Graham]

I've looked though every log I could find, both in /var/opt/nextpvr and journalctl but had no luck there... there didnt seem to much in the logs in fact.

Please attach logs to a post after your next recording attempt telling us the time and name of the show so we know where to look in the logs ... https://github.com/sub3/NextPVR/wiki/get-help ... Thanks.

[MadBeggar]

Will do...

Although, of course, now that I'm trying to reproduce the issue while debugging (creating manual scheduled recordings and looking at how they trigger/behave) it actually works fine *facepalm*... lol

Just a curiosity question (not sure if its the right place to ask):
In NShared.IPTVRecorder :
As this is a direct stream capture (no transcoding involved), I that the genericCapture.SetBaseSource() is set to the URL of the stream directly.
If I follow that trail into NShared.Shim.GenericCapture and NShared.Shim.InputSource, I thought there might be an exception thrown all the way back up to the recorder if the stream were to unexpectedly be interrupted so that the recorder would attempt to resume if the end time of the scheduled recording hasnt been reached.... but I couldnt find something like that.
Is it possible that my http stream is getting interrupted somehow and the recorder has no way of recovering ?

Thanks for the help... I really appreciate it... This is driving me nuts ! I havent been able to see this week's episode of Star Trek Discovery yet because the last 2 recordings of it failed

[mvallevand]

If your provider offers m3u8 files that is a better option in general for IPTV.

If it is a ts file you might not get back much logging In cases like this I suspect the provider just stops sending data without closing the socket so there is nothing to trigger an exception. There is a bug on m3u8 downloads when data stops on an exception and NextPVR doesn't technically stop the recording so perhaps ts file processing has a similar bug.

Martin

[MadBeggar]

Good to know.
I just updated my channel source to m3u8 URLs (the provider does support it).
That did trigger a segmentation fault the first time around. But I restarted the service, delete the "Device" and added it back and everything seems to be ok now.
Out of curiosity, is there any reason not to watch a program that is currently being recorded (say for example that I'm recording a show and start watching it 20 minutes in while its still recording) by playing the recording itself ?
The reason for my question is that I think I did that on the recordings that failed so it might be a possible cause.

[mvallevand]

Not enough info. In progress recordings in Kodi will be different then in the web. Kodi should handle it fine, I don't have a clue about the web app for recordings, I don't spend that much time using a browser.

If you played live tv on a channel that was recording and you don't have the required number of streams available sub doesn't default NextPVR to use multii-rec (play multiple instances of the same stream) so that might cause a recording failure if the host killed the original instance.

Martin