What does this mean: Recording due to start pre-padding, but tuner not available

[PapaJay]

I had a recording failure last night. Checking the NRecord log I found 'Recording due to start pre-padding, but tuner not available'. Please seen NRecord.log.2 at this time stamp 2017-10-27 22:58:00.133 for this repeating message. A subsequent recording 3 hours later worked fine with no intervention by me. However, it too had the tuner not available message until immediately before the show started at 23:00. We didn't know the one recording had failed and the other had succeeded until this morning when I happened to be checking the 'What's New' GUI.

I have attached logs that we zipped this morning.

My OTA tuner is a HDHomeRun Connect with two tuners. What I think the message means is that when NextPVR requested a tuner for recording, the HDHomeRun box responded that no tuner was available - that both tuners were in use. I do know that that this should not have been true - zero tuners should have been in use when NextPVR requested one.

Can someone confirm that NextPVR does not keep track of what tuners are in use, and that it can only find out that there is no tuner available when it requests a tuner. I am trying to make sure that this could not be a NextPVR problem before I open another problem with the HDHomeRun team. This problem happened last spring and it appears to be usage related - after some large number of requests for a tuner, the HDHomeRun says none are available, and a power off, power on cycle of the HDHomeRun initially eliminates the problem, but it will reoccur after many more requests for a tuner.

Sorry to ask for details on how this works, but I am trying to avoid a finger pointer match between NextPVR support and HDHomeRun support with me in the middle.

Thank You.

[sub]

Can someone confirm that NextPVR does not keep track of what tuners are in use, and that it can only find out that there is no tuner available when it requests a tuner.

Nope, that is not correct. It allocates each recording to a tuner at the time it is scheduled. There is some scenarios where it can end up using a different tuner, like when live tv was using the tuner it had intended to use, and another with the same channel is free etc. If there is no alternative tuner available, a user will be kicked out of live tv to ensure a recording can happen.

This "Recording due to start pre-padding, but tuner not available" means that it was due to start the pre-padding of a recording, but the tuner is not currently available, so it'll wont actually start the recording until the official start time of the recording (ignoring pre-padding). Padding is always treated as "desirable, but optional", so wont happen if it'd mean disrupting another recording. ie, this is like the scenario where you have one tuner, scheduled to be recording 8pm-9pm on WCBS, and at 9pm-10pm on WABC - if that second recording had requested pre-padding of 2 minutes, in effect starting at 8:58pm, the tuner was unavailable because it was still busy with WCBS, so the recording wouldn't start until 9pm. For that two minutes between 8:58 and 9:00, you'll get that warning message in the log.

[mvallevand]

Perhaps you need to correct the date on your machine,those logs appear to be from October. In any case you didn't include all the logs zip using the button on the first setup screen.

Martin