[mythtv-users] recordings mysteriously cut off

Scott M. Sorrentino scott at sorrentino.net
Wed Feb 8 15:36:10 UTC 2006


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I actually had a similar problem, though was not lucky enough to have one 
recording end prematurely and subsequent ones still record at all without 
intervention.

My setup is different in that I have both a PVR-350 and PVR-250 in my backend
using the ivtv drivers.  I noticed shortly after upgrading from a fairly stable
0.16 to 0.18.1 that random recordings would end early and the backend log
would say nothing to indicate a problem.  If the show was running from 7:53pm
to 9:07pm mythbackend would log a start of recording at 7:53pm and a "finished 
recording" message at 9:07pm.  But the file size was clearly too small and did 
not contain 74 minutes of video.  When this problem came up, any recordings
scheduled after the broken one would not run, and again no entries in
mythbackend's log to indicate why (with full logging enabled).

At first, I thought it was IVTV but did not find any ivtv errors in my system 
logs.  I finally managed to catch mythtv "in the act" and noted that it kept
my video device (/dev/video0 in this case) open but the file it was writing to
did not increase in size.  Again, nothing in the mythbackend log indicated
there was a problem.  If I stopped mythbackend and read from that video
device, I got what I expected (good video).  This seemed, to me, to let IVTV
off the hook.  Restarting mythbackend at this point continued recording 
the problem show, albeit with a new filename.  I wrote a watchdog script to
check for this condition and restart when needed, but having recordings broken 
up like that was a pain (and sometimes they didn't resume recording after the
restart).

The only other mention I could find on the mailing lists of this issue was
in this thread:  http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/134039
The poster was using realtime commflag (which I tried too, for a bit) and 
indicated the problem went away after disabling real-time.

While I was waiting for 0.19 to be released, I noticed a "release-0-18-fixes" 
branch in SVN (dubbed "0.18.2").  Updating my setup to this version seems
to have solved the problem so far.  Of course, it's always hard to tell when 
you've squashed a "random" bug for sure :)

At least I hope it's fixed.  Nothing kills the WAF like having her shows 
truncated...

On Tue, Feb 07, 2006 at 09:36:51PM +0000, mstrimel at comcast.net wrote:
> hi,
> My last few recordings have been:
> 2hrs scheduled  .... 1:37 actually recorded
> 1 hr scheduled .... :37 minutes actually recorded
> 2 hours scheduled ... 46 minutes actually recorded.
> 
> The backend log shows the recording start/stop commands being given at the right times. mythbackend doesn't seem to have crashed.
> 
> My card is PVR-150, and mythtv 0.18.1 compiled from source.
> 

- --
Scott M. Sorrentino <scott at sorrentino.net>
AIM://sinepaw :: JABBER://scott@jabber.sorrentino.net :: HTTP://sinepaw.org/

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