Tuner causes Nrecord crash??

[StevHodge]

I have been plagued by Nrecord crashes when recording two programmes at once for a while, and have at last manage to reliably replicate them.

Attached are four suites of logs from four separate events.

In summary what seems to happen is that if I schedule a recording which requires both tuners to be in use I get a crash

I am running a Nova-DT DVB-T card with two tuners under windows XP with an AMD Athlon 5000 dual core processor running at 2.21 ghz with 1.74 gb of RAM

I thought for while that it might be a conflict problem not handled correctly by nrecord, but i am coming to the conclusion that it is something to do with the tuner card.

Oct26Fail3.zip is the key suite of logs. The machine ran along quite happily until a second tuner was required, when recording stopped,.Up until then it was recording 'midsomer murders' and 'countdown' and then 'deal or no deal' quite happily, and simulateneously, but both on the same tuner. then' pointless' started at 4.30 which needed another frequency and everything stopped, despite what the logs say.

The logs in Oct26Fail1.zip show a case where three programmes werev scheduled - 'Aplace in the sun' from 1205 to 1310, 'GMT with..' from 12.30 and 'Due South' from 13.00. the last two mentioned were scheduled, then the machine restarted and then the first mentioned was scheduled. Despite what the logs say all recording stopped at 12.30, I got 25 minutes of the first, about 15 seconds of the second and none of the third programme.

The logs in Oct26 fail2 have two programmes . one 'Instant restaurant' was scheduled for 1415, the machine restarted then ' Lassie..' started at about 14.00.Everything stopped at about 14.20, although at the time the status showed both programmes as being recorded, one on one of the tuners the other on the other. I knew they had stopped though as the file sizes stopped incrementing. At some point after this and before 1500 the machine blue screened

The logs in CrashOct25 show a similar event. in this everything stopped at about 2100 even though the logs seem to say otherwise, and eventually the machine blue screened

Help!!!

Steve Hodge

[sub]

If you bump the thread next week (when I'm back in NZ), then I'll take a look.

[StevHodge]

Thanks sub, Hope you had a good trip

Attaching another suite of logs which maybe are clearer. Sequence is that three programmes are set to record on 29/10 starting at 00:15 00:20 and 00:25. The 00:15 and 00:25 are on the same frequency (481834) and the 00:20 on another. All three programmes start being recrded but at 00:36 they all stop simultaeneously. Up this point the reccrdings are there (I have played the stub files) but after 00:36, nothing. The nrecord log seems to carry on though, and eventually the recording are marked as failed. Then, 99 minutes later, at 3:15, long after the three recordings should all have finished the whole system blue screens.

Nothing else is going on with the machine, while all this happens

I can duplicate this for you, and send the system crash logs too (i think) if this would help, but maybe you can see it straight away

Feels like some sort of overflow problem connected with the use of the two tuners, but if this is it is quite subtle. I have freqently managed to record the same show up four times simultaeneouly, finshing up with four seperate perfectly good recordings, but having used both tuners I get into this confusion because a scheduled recurring recording does not show up red on the Guide, so i keep thinking I haven't scheduled it

[sub]

Then, 99 minutes later, at 3:15, long after the three recordings should all have finished the whole system blue screens.

If your system blue screens, then this is definitely going to be a driver bug, or some sort of hardware instability. If it's a driver bug, there is usually something in the Windows Event Viewer to state the faulting module, which can help narrow down the cause.

[StevHodge]

OK sub, thnaks. I'll duplicate the crash and look in the event viewer. i did look already but maybe not hard enough

[sub]

Alternatively the faulting module is shown on the blue screen text.

[StevHodge]

I find i cannot relaibly duplicate the system crash, although i can reliably duplicate the failure of crash of nrecord. Here is anpther set of logs, but they don't showanything different to the last time. Nrecord crashes when recoprding programmes on two different frequencies, a few minutes afterthe recordings have started. This one shows a crash which occurred at 23:32 42 minutes after the first programme started and 12 minutes after the second.in this case there wasa third programme scheduled at 23.35, with a two minute lead in, so I think it actually crashed when the third programme tried to start
I may have misled you over 'bluescreen' What I actually got was a microsoft message saying the system had recovered from a serious error. After recovery ntray and nrecord were still stalled, so perhaps it didn't fully blue screen. It all happened in the middle of the night so the machine was unattended

[StevHodge]

sub
Duplicated the sytem failure last night.
Got the message 'System has recovered etc etc........'

The error signature generated by the system for the nrecord crash is
szAppName : NRecord.exe szAppVer : 1.0.0.0 szModName : PsisDecd.dll
szModVer : 6.5.2600.5512 offset : 000095b0

There was also a text accompat.txt which I have zipped and attached. I have the npvr and nrecord logs for this event zipped too, but they don't show anything different to all the others, so haven't sent them

The event log just said that nrecord terminated unexpectedly at 1.32

[sub]

The error signature generated by the system for the nrecord crash is
szAppName : NRecord.exe szAppVer : 1.0.0.0 szModName : PsisDecd.dll
szModVer : 6.5.2600.5512 offset : 000095b0

This is somewhat common for lots of TV apps (particularly for XP users). If you google "PsisDecd.dll", the first page of search results will have threads about it on the Hauppauge forums and the Mediaportal forums.

Basically, this is a Microsoft component that is monitoring channel metadata in the broadcast stream, but can crash when it encounters unexpected data that some broadcasters use. The fix it getting a different version of PsisDecd.dll. You should be able to find links to them on those Hauppauge or Mediaportal threads.

[StevHodge]

Thanks sub, that seems to have fixed it. For the benefit of others with the same problem the Hauppauge forum says that version 6.5.2600.5512 of psisdecd.dll is the one that you want, but that is the same one that causes the crashes, i think due to the meta content on the BBC. I replaced it - after a struggle with microsoft file protection with a two year older version, much smaller in size (230 kb v 355 kb) numbered 6.05.2715.2883 which i found in the media portal forum, inside a package called dbfix.zip