recordings stopping mid way

[haverer2]

Hello!
I keep getting recordings fail part way through a recording.... could anyone tell me which logs I'd need to upload to have someone with more knowledge than me see if they can spot a reason??

THanks,
John

[sub]

What type of tuner?

[johnsonx42]

Perhaps my past attempts at instructive humor have fallen flat in this area, but why not just post the whole log folder as has been repeatedly suggested? It's always helpful, and often necessary, to say which specific recording(s) had the problem and when the problem occurred (or how much of the recording you got before it failed or went black-screen, whatever), but without knowing already what the problem is it can't be said which logs are needed. The cause of a problem in a recording may be something that happened hours before in a different log, or it may be the culmination of a long sequence of otherwise unremarkable events spread over multiple logs. There are also details of your setup revealed in logs that otherwise have nothing to do with the problem.

If you post all your logs and some of them aren't relevant to the issue at hand, we just won't look at those. Promise.

Or look at it another way, you came online about 10 hours ago and asked which logs to post and haven't been back since, which is entirely reasonable as you have other things to do. Had you just posted the full logs then, sub, Martin, I and probably a few others would have already had a look and someone might be offering guidance or even a solution by now. Instead we'll be debating which logs to upload until some time tomorrow, and then maybe you'll actually upload some or all logs some hours or days after that.

On the upside, I'll be away for the weekend getting my a$$ kicked at a baseball umpire training school so this'll be the end of lectures from me about posting logs. But I am just dying to see how this all comes out.

[haverer2]

Hope the baseball went well!!! :-)

consider myself instructed re log uploading ;-)

The reason I hadn't checked back for 10hrs is that I hadn't had an email notification of any replies to the post. I did subscribe to the thread for instant notification, but it didn't seem to work.

So... I've attached here my whole log directory.
I use a DVB-T2 tuner (PCTV e290) and a PCTV 460e Satellite tuner.
My channels are merged and so either tuner is capable of picking up most of the channels I watch. I'm not 100% sure which tuner was being used at the time - or whether the problem is only restricted to one tuner.... I'll keep an eye on this and see.

The latest recording to have the issue was recorded on Channel 4HD.
It was aired between 8pm and 9pm GTM on Thursday 22nd January 2015
It was called "Location Location Location"
The average file size for this recording is usually 2.3GB
The last night is only 914MB in size and is 23mins 34 secs in length.
The recording plays perfectly until the point it cut off.

The machine recording is a Win7 64bit machine, i7 960 @3.2 GHz processor with 4MB RAM.

I'm hoping I've included everything needed in a clear and concise manner, but if there's anything else I can provide which is helpful, please let me know.

Thanks in advance for any time anyone spends looking at logs.

[Graham]

So... I've attached here my whole log directory.

... and the files in the log directory are not as I expected.

The most recent nrecord.log suggests that the recording service hasn't run since 17 January. The npvr.log suggests that NextPVR hasn't run since 20 January.

Plus the content of the nrecord logs suggest that your tuners have got in a pickle. It may be that you added a tuner device and then removed that device (and then added it back, maybe) and one or more channels is still associated with the "missing" tuner.

NextPVR creates a ndigitalhost log for each tuner (with some devices havinng dual or quad tuners). It is the ndigitalhost logs that report the activity of each tuner.

The ndigitalhost-20 log has

2015-01-22 08:10:55.365 [DEBUG][6] locked=1, present=1, strength=100, quality=100 (took 250ms to check)

and

15-01-23 02:01:38.889 [DEBUG][93] locked=1, present=1, strength=100, quality=52 (took 703ms to check)

and

2015-01-23 02:06:46.035 [DEBUG][37] locked=1, present=1, strength=20, quality=0 (took 187ms to check)

The variations in the values for "strength" and "quality" suggest a reception problem or a cable problem. If the tuner is able to get "strength" and "quality" of "100" at one time, it should get values of "100" all (or most) of the time.

I suggest that you delete all of the files in the log folder and then re-boot to restart everything from scratch. You can monitor the files that get created in the log folder. If you see three ndigitalhost logs and you only have two single tuner devices, then you have a "phantom" tuner in your database. The easiest fix for that is to delete all devices and channels and start over.

Plus, check all of the cables and whatnot ... it may be that recordings are failing cos of loose connections. It may also be that you are getting dodgy reception cos of trees or weather or gremlins.

[sub]

Location Location Location looks like it started recording at 2015-01-22 19:59:00, on your 'PCTV 290e/460e BDA 2875 TVTuner', and stopped at 2015-01-22 20:46:09. So in theory, you recording should have been longer than 23 minutes 34 seconds. It looks like either the device stopped delivering data (like lost signal lock, or driver fault) (or you ran out of hard drive space). ie, as far as NextPVR was concerned, the recording was still in progress, but the device stopped delivering data.

You should probably keep an eye on whether these partial recordings are always on your PCTV 290e.

I did note the log messages indicating your signal quality seems to vary quite a bit from recording to recording. Every manufacturer reports signal info using different numbers, but it did look like the quality was low at times.

[haverer2]

Thanks for the replies everyone...

I actually own 2x PCTV 290e devices and 1x PCTV 460e device.

I had all three connected when I initially did my channel scans. I removed one of the PCTV 290e tuners a little while ago because one of my USB devices keeps connecting/disconnecting and I'm trying to work out which one...

That device is still listed in NPVR but shows as disconnected. This will be my there's the 3 log files for 3 different tuners...

I'm wondering whether I should bite the bullet and get rid of the USB sticks and go for a quad internal tuner instead.... is there a quad tuner than is particullarly recommended??

I'll delete all the logs and restart machine and monitor what happens.

Thanks for input so far.

John

[haverer2]

quality thing is odd though, as I can get perfect picture - suddenly stops playing - restart and it's perfect picture again... it's have expected to see some sort of breaking up of the signal if it was of poor quality... ?

Also wondering whether it makes a difference that playback is through Kodi? What I might do is run it through kodi on one machine side by side with another running it in npvr and see whether they both stop..

[martint123]

I found I had to use a powered hub to get my PCTV290e to work reliably in my test machine. They are quite hungry power-wise.
All my lockups and dropouts stopped when I did that.

[Reddwarf]

I found I had to use a powered hub to get my PCTV290e to work reliably in my test machine. They are quite hungry power-wise.
All my lockups and dropouts stopped when I did that.

Yeah, that's my experience too, ALWAYS use powered hub's for tuners.