GBPVR randomly fails to record a show

[WhyGumby]

Hi, I've had problem show up a couple weeks ago on my old reliable system where a tv show randomly fails to record. It creates the mpg file for the show, but it is always 48 KB and contains only the opening frame. It is always when I have several shows in a row recording, and the show after the failure usually works fine.

I have a ATI TV Wonder HD 650 USB plugged into a Acer Travelmate Laptop with 1.3 MHz Centrino, 1.5 GB, lots of diskspace, etc.

The problem started with an old version of gppvr, and the upgrade to current did not fix it.

I've attached some logs and config files -- the example is at 22:00 - The Big Idea ... I restarted the service at 22:17 when I noticed it failed.

Any ideas?

[sub]

There logs show no sign of any errors occuring for that recording. It seems as though everything has hooked up correctly, but the device has failed to deliver any data.

This is very uncommon for an analog deivce. In fact, I dont remember if I've ever seen reports of an analog device that create zero byte (or very small) recordings.

[WhyGumby]

I have several more examples from the logs, but the failed recordings look just like the successful ones.

My idea now is that the "new" show is started before the device is prepared to accept a "start a stream" command after stopping the "previous show". The recordings usually start 3-4 seconds after the hour, but when I start the ATI Catalyst Media Center interface, it takes many seconds (5-10) to actually display a video stream, which is much much longer than my old Haupaugge USB unit that I used to have (and got hit by a surge during a lightning storm). And the cpu, disk, etc are mostly idle, so I assume that the device or the usb is the critical path for the delay. And the new ATI device worked without this problem for several months.

So my question is -- Is this likely to be a hardware, wiring, flaw of some kind, or will it be beneficial to clean all the codecs, video software, etc from my computer to solve the problem?

I have today replaced the USB cable (a shorter, more expensive cable). My next idea is to give the device a 30 second break between shows to give it time to shut down and prepare for the next recording.