[mythtv-users] MythWeb says recording LiveTV - but no FE on

[Michael T. Dean]

On 04/09/2010 01:09 PM, Mike Perkins wrote:
> Brad Fuller wrote:
>> I googled this, couldn't find an answer.
>> MythWeb>>Backend Status says:
>>
>> Encoder 7 is local on killtivo and is watching Live TV 'Rachael Ray'
>> on KPIX-DT. This recording is scheduled to end at 10:00 AM.
>>
>> But, there is no FE watching, in fact there is no FE even on. Is there
>> a way I can trace where the FE would be or who asked the BE to record?
>> Doesn't seem to be a bogus display as I saw the recording program
>> change at the hour.
>>
> This can happen if a front-end dies. I mean dies in the technical 
> sense, the user might just think that (s)he switched it off properly. 
> In this case, the back end will just keep recording program after 
> program onto disk - and then expiring them shortly afterwards.

Exactly.

>
> I had this happen to me late one evening, and I didn't find out about 
> it until I did my standard system checks late the following morning. 
> The last program shown recorded by mythweb was 11 hours long and some 
> humongous number of gigabytes! The selected channel closed down 
> overnight and the damn thing just kept recording.
>
> I'm a little more careful now. Your Family May Vary.

While I'm sure something was unusual about the recordings you got, 
there's no (known) possible way that Live TV would show as an 11-hr 
recording.  First, Live TV recordings are always broken on program 
change, so the largest recording you could possibly have would be the 
length of the longest show in your listings (on that channel during the 
period in which you were recording).  And, as an added safety check, in 
the event you really have a very long program listed in your guide data 
(due to garbage guide data or really long shows like that one 12-hour 
race or whatever), the recordings will be broken into 8-hour hunks max.

Further, if you have no listings, the Live TV recordings are always 
broken at the top-of-the and half-past-the hour (which means without 
listings, the maximum length of a LiveTV recording is 30mins).

So I'm guessing you had a channel whose listings showed "TBA" or 
something as a large (8+ hr) block overnight and got at most an 8hr 
recording.

I accidentally turned on Live TV for about 20hrs last week and just 
ended up with a bunch of recordings of shows I didn't want in the LiveTV 
recording group where they expired a day later.

If that's not what happened, I'd love for you to find out why so we can 
fix the corner case that no one has ever considered before.

All this assumes you're using MythTV 0.19 or higher.  :)

Mike