Recording Service Getting Stuck "Recording"

[smajor]

My recordings on the server have been pretty rock solid since 2.15.

Twice now since doing the R1 patches, I've found one of the HD-PVRs stuck "on", the clients think it is free, but the recording service thinks it's still recording something from hours before.

In this case, my wife set it to record "The Cabin" which was, I think, 2 hours. By the time I noticed the above, it had recorded for 10 hours straight and just shy of a 40GB file. Impressive!

Restarting the recording service frees it up. Logs attached.

[johnsonx42]

unfortunately there's nothing in your logs about that recording; they're all full of client playback messages. we need to talk sub into reducing the client-playback debug output, or re-direct it to another log file so we can see what NRecord is doing.

[smajor]

...or increase the size/number of the logs that are saved. My server has a 1TB in it, soon to be 2TB as the primary/recording drive with everything else on NAS. I have no fear of big logs files if it helps debugging!

[rwnz]

This has been happening to me too on occasions, but only since I upgraded to 2.1.5. Most of the time my recordings start and stop as required. The last lime it happened may have been when two programs were being recorded simultaneously on a dual DVB tuner (though the start and stop times may have been different). However only one program failed to stop recording.

[shaunpatrick77]

Had a re-occurrence of what may be the same/related issue. Npvr shows a recording that should have finished hours ago as still in progress. Almost as if communication between the recording service and the client was lost. A quick peek showed there was nothing logged in the c:\temp folder, so I assume that the recording service didn't crash.

[johnsonx42]

there are two scenarios I've seen where you'll get a recording that appears to not stop:

1) something goes wrong when the recording starts; the recording file is 0 bytes. when it tries to stop it will appear to fail, but in fact the failure happened when it started. at this point some or all of NRecord is crashed (in fact some part of NRecord crashed when the recording started)

2) something goes wrong when the recording stops; NRecord will try to end the recording, but when it issues the commands to stop the graph something hangs yet the recording itself does actually stop. at this point some or all of NRecord is crashed; you'll often see the message "Async Stop taking too long", followed by a few other messages where NRecord is trying to tear down the graph, and then it will just go silent

I sometimes see a third scenario where another recording is in progress when #1 or #2 occurs and NRecord crashes, the other recording will actually just keep going until you kill NRecord. But in this scenario the run-on recording is NOT the problem, it's the other one.

In either case, sometimes there's a crash.mdmp, sometimes there isn't. It seems to depend on exactly how and where NRecord crashed.

The mystery continues to be exactly why NRecord crashes in these situations. Troubleshooting this is on hold until the next version comes out, because sub's moved beyond 2.1.5 and can't look at the crash.mdmp files any more (the debug symbols no longer match up to his code).

[shaunpatrick77]

No problem, will hold off digging any further until after the next (eagerly awaited) release. Thanks for the update!

[Nistrod]

I too have had this problem. In my case, there was a program being recorded at 3am, when the EPG update kicked off.
The log shows the update trying to use the same tuner, and failing.
The log shows that it "stopped" recording the show, and kicked off postprocessing.bat.

Now, my postprocessing.bat recodes the file to an avi.
This morning, when I restarted the recording service, the TS file was 20GB (8 hours).
The AVI is only 900MB (1 hour) long.
The log file for postprocessing.bat has an error at the point where I move the TS file somewhere, that says that the file is still in use.

Its looks like under these circumstances, it tries to stop, but doesnt, but thinks it has.

Maybe these are the same circumstances that smajor was having?

[Reddwarf]

I too have had this problem. In my case, there was a program being recorded at 3am, when the EPG update kicked off.
The log shows the update trying to use the same tuner, and failing.
The log shows that it "stopped" recording the show, and kicked off postprocessing.bat.

Now, my postprocessing.bat recodes the file to an avi.
This morning, when I restarted the recording service, the TS file was 20GB (8 hours).
The AVI is only 900MB (1 hour) long.
The log file for postprocessing.bat has an error at the point where I move the TS file somewhere, that says that the file is still in use.

Its looks like under these circumstances, it tries to stop, but doesnt, but thinks it has.

Maybe these are the same circumstances that smajor was having?

Have you upgraded to 2.2.6?

[baj1]

We have this problem also, using v2.4.3. It seems to happen with recurring recordings setup to record all shows, and possibly only when there are multiple shows on consecutively on the same channel.

Last week we had a 30 minute episode of "Betty White's Off Their Rockers" record for 38 hours, filling the HDD. This also wiped out our config.xml file as NPVR occasionally writes this file. Word to the wise, consider separate HDD partitions for your recordings and Win-dohs!/NPVR. That's on my list for this box, along with about a dozen other things... ...when I get some time. My wife says she has seen this with other shows in the past, but couldn't be specific about when. The shows she mentioned are reruns on stations that tend to show episodes for several hours straight.

This problem is actually occurring as I type as the previously mentioned show should have finished recording about 1:45 ago but the file is well over 2 hours worth in size and still growing.

Logs are attached.

TIA
-Brad