sage and random hangs?

[bodgadle]

Hi all,

I'm having some weirdness with sage since I installed 1.4.3

When I go to sage recordings and try to view a recording, sageTV just hangs, no errors, no disk activty, no high CPU usage either, just sits and hangs. This seems to happen after i've watched something else first.

Another thing is that when i go to guide and pick "delete now" for a program it seems to take a minute of crazy disk activity to delete the file (about 1gb) and then hangs too

I upgraded by just installing 1.4.3 over my previous version, should I have deleted the wiz.bin or something first?

[bodgadle]

i'm wondering if it's messing my wiz.bin file? I've copied the wiz.bin i had before the upgrade and i can watch the programs there without any problems. But once i copy the new wiz.bin over I have major problems watching & deleting stuff from the guide.

Also noticed a folder called "errant" in my videos folder? With some programs in there which i definitley didnt delete?

Is there a wiz.bin rebuilder/checker or something we can use?

[salsbst]

I had problems like this. I deleted everything in the dir. where Sage stores its recordings (including the "errant" directory), and all these problems went away.

[bodgadle]

did you have to delete your wiz.bin too? I dont really want to do that as i'll loose all my favourites etc. etc.

We coul really do witha small app to check wiz.bin and repair if necessary

[justme]

I agree with the concept of a wiz repair tool. I would love to have one. I just don't think we'll see one unless it comes from a user, since so much of SageTv's "secret sauce" is in the wiz file.

I use a perl script originally made by KJake to make dated backups of my Wiz and properties files every day. Right now it will keep two weeks of backups. I'm currently learning perl, and made some small changes. I would like to modify the script even more to only make a backup of the wiz file if it has changed since the last backup. I also want to change it to keep X number of backups, rather than using the date to delete old files. This would allow me to run the script every few hours and always have backups of the 15 ,or so, most recent changes.

The script has already helped me recover from a bad install(my fault) of the most recent beta.

[bodgadle]

yeah suppose writing a little console app to do automated backups wont take too long at all, but would need to keep say a weeks worth of backups as i think 15 last wont help much esp if you are backing up every few hours. Since if the problem happened one evening and you didnt touch your sage box for a day or two then all your backups would have the corrupt wiz.bin?

Anyway have gone back to 1.38 at the moment as that still seems to work fine for me with my wiz.bin

[justme]

Since if the problem happened one evening and you didnt touch your sage box for a day or two then all your backups would have the corrupt wiz.bin?

Good point. This is one of the reasons I wanted to change the script to only make a backup if the wiz changed. ie You didn't run SageTV in 2 weeks(unlikely), but the wiz file was corrupted on your last use. In the original script this would have resulted in 14 identical copies of a corrupt wiz. The current behavior is also not as good at recovering recent recordings, like those less than 24 hours old.

Maybe I should implement both schemes, so that there is always a recent backup every few hours(to avoid losing too much recorded show data). And a daily backup that stay for stays for two weeks. You could lose alot of data if you had to use a copy that was several days old, but at least you would get a stable SageTV that still has your favorites and Intelligent Recording. By using both I could then decrease the number of hourly backups kept, and still have a long term backup.

Thanx for pointing out what could have been a critical flaw. Any other suggestions on the scipt's backup behavior would be welcomed. As stated before I'm very new to this. I just started learning Perl last week.

Thanks

[Narflex]

SageTV actually does a full repair on the Wiz file every time it writes it back to disk.

Next time you think you have Wiz corruption, force an EPG download (go to Channel Setup->(select a provider if asked)->hit Enter twice->Hit right arrow). After the download is done, SageTV recompresses the Wiz file which should correct any errors.

Which of you that are having problems are using the EPG Plugin and which are using SageTV Service?

[bodgadle]

Thanks for the info Jeff, i'll install 1.4.3 again later and try the rebuild.

I'm using the EPG Plugin with XMLTV, had no problems until i installed 1.4.3 the other day but that could just have been a co-incidence. Went back to 1.3.8 and it worked fine watching my sage recordings though.

[bodgadle]

Damn,

I had reverted back to 1.3.8 yesterday and a couple of programs had been recorded. Just went back to 1.4.3 to try the wiz.bin rebuild, did as Jeff described. Went to my sage recordings section, clicked on the program, and it's hung again, no disk activity, nothing, just hung (

Wonder if it's just a problem between 1.3.8 recordings being played on 1.4.3?

Anyway just rebooted machine, watched an episode of something, went to "delete now" after i'd watched and.... it hung again!!!

Here's the tail from my sage_0.txt from that session, sage has totally hung again now so will have to reboot... back to 1.3.8 for me I think

Wed 7/2 9:37:34.414 VideoFrame got an old file currEnc=null newEnc=Hauppauge WinTV PVR PCI II Capture DVD Standard Play ~ 3.25GB per hr
Wed 7/2 9:37:34.665 VF processing job VFJob[Play r=0.0 t=0 file=null ifn=null] nPlayin=true
Wed 7/2 9:37:34.775 VF processing on UI Thread VFJob[Play r=0.0 t=0 file=null ifn=null]
Wed 7/2 9:37:34.775 BVF setting rate to 1.0
Wed 7/2 9:37:34.875 VF processing job null nPlayin=true
Wed 7/2 9:37:34.875 VF thread is now waiting for 2562047788015:12:55.807
Wed 7/2 9:40:21.865 setUI(sage.w@1da366c)
Wed 7/2 9:40:21.875 VF.submitJob(VFJob[Pause r=0.0 t=0 file=null ifn=null])
Wed 7/2 9:40:21.875 VF.submitJob(VFJob[WatchCompleteCheck r=0.0 t=0 file=null ifn=null])
Wed 7/2 9:40:21.875 VF processing job VFJob[Pause r=0.0 t=0 file=null ifn=null] nPlayin=true
Wed 7/2 9:40:21.875 VF processing on UI Thread VFJob[Pause r=0.0 t=0 file=null ifn=null]
Wed 7/2 9:40:21.885 VF processing job VFJob[WatchCompleteCheck r=0.0 t=0 file=null ifn=null] nPlayin=false
Wed 7/2 9:40:21.885 VF Watch Complete Check currFile=MediaFile[A[453675,453674,"Ultimate Gamer",64940@0701.23:25,30] host=PVR C:\Program Files\Frey Technologies\SageTV\Video\UltimateGamer-453675-0.mpg, Seg0[Tue 7/1 23:24:55.007-Tue 7/1 23:55:00.003]] loggedWatch=false
Wed 7/2 9:40:21.885 VF processing job null nPlayin=false
Wed 7/2 9:40:21.925 VF thread is now waiting for 0:00:00.000
Wed 7/2 9:40:23.197 setUI(sage.w@11201a1)
Wed 7/2 9:40:23.758 setUI(sage.ai@12ee2a)
Wed 7/2 9:40:26.452 PopupChoice [Close, Detailed Info, Watched, Remove from Favorites, Don't Like, Move to Library, Delete Now, Incorrectly Recorded, Additional Airings] default=Detailed Info
Wed 7/2 9:40:28.915 PopupChoice=Delete Now
Wed 7/2 9:40:28.915 PopupChoice Are you sure you want to delete "Ultimate Gamer"? [Yes, No] default=Yes
Wed 7/2 9:40:30.427 PopupChoice=Yes
Wed 7/2 9:40:30.437 VF.submitJob(VFJob[CloseMF r=0.0 t=0 file=null ifn=null])
Wed 7/2 9:40:30.437 VF processing job VFJob[CloseMF r=0.0 t=0 file=null ifn=null] nPlayin=false
Wed 7/2 9:40:30.638 VF processing on UI Thread VFJob[CloseMF r=0.0 t=0 file=null ifn=null]
Wed 7/2 9:40:30.658 Added:Watched[id=464892 Airing=A[453675,453674,"Ultimate Gamer",64940@0701.23:25,30], WatchStart=Tue 7/1 23:25:00.000, WatchEnd=Tue 7/1 23:27:50.297, RealStart=Wed 7/2 9:37:34.414, RealEnd=Wed 7/2 9:40:30.638]

[justme]

To Narflex:I use the SageTV's EPG service. I believe my install problem was caused by me failling to uninstall SageTV before installing the new beta. So as I said it's my fault, since you tell us to uninstall first.
Thanks for the tip on Wiz repair.


bodgadle wrote:

Wonder if it's just a problem between 1.3.8 recordings being played on 1.4.3?

I doubt it since I have over 26 hours of 1.3.8 recordings that are fine in 1.4.3. I watched a couple and even deleted one to try and duplicate your situation. Still weird that they work in 1.3.8 and not 1.4.3.
Best of luck

[salsbst]

I had to delete all of my recordings again last night (this time they were all 1.4.3 recordings). To reiterate, my symptom is that attempting to view either the Guide or Live TV causes SageTV to hang its process. When XP kills it off (via end task in task manager), Windows reports a crash in SageLauncher.exe.

And, no, I haven't had to delete wiz.bin.

I'm using the Sage EPG service.

[bodgadle]

I've ended up reverting back to 1.3.8 now, everything seems to work fine for me in that one, have you tried that salsbst?

[salsbst]

Yes... I didn't have that problem with 1.3.8. However, I did have video freezes that seem to have been corrected in 1.4.3. If I have to pick my poison I'll stick with 1.4.3 for now