Aborted recordings using firewire tuner

[deria]

Hi,

I use a Firewire tuner (Motorola DCT 62xx HD). I'm trying to understand why Heroes (and several other shows) have failed to record as scheduled (the issue is definitely not scheduling, as the log files clearly show that SageTV is doing its job and *trying* to record).

I've recently started recording more and more shows in high definition using the Firewire tuner (by setting its merit to 1 and the merit of the other encoders to 2) so the tuner is being asked to do more (like record shows back to back, for example).

If I look at the log file, I see:

Mon 5/7 22:00:00.010 Seeker.startRecord(SGraphRecorder on 127.0.0.1:6969 A[1232918,1229868,"Heroes",19630@0507.22:00,61], currTime=Mon 5/7 22:00:00.005) currRecord=null switch=false

So far, so good. SageTV thinks that it should be doing a recording, at least, so it starts one.

I then see several lines of the following:

Mon 5/7 22:00:06.662 MMC sent request to 127.0.0.1:6969 of GET_FILE_SIZE E:\sage\Heroes-TheHardPart-1232918-0.mpg
Mon 5/7 22:00:06.663 MMC received response from 127.0.0.1:6969 of 200

followed by:

Mon 5/7 22:00:06.757 Removing zero length file from video dir:C:\sage\null.ts
Mon 5/7 22:05:06.825 SEEKER HAS DETECTED A HALT IN THE ENCODER...TRYING TO RESET IT
Mon 5/7 22:05:06.825 VF.submitJob(VFJob[InactiveFile r=0.0 t=0 file=null ifn=E:\sage\Heroes-TheHardPart-1232918-0.mpg])
Mon 5/7 22:05:06.836 MMC sent request to 127.0.0.1:6969 of STOP
Mon 5/7 22:05:07.123 MMC received response from 127.0.0.1:6969 of OK
Mon 5/7 22:05:07.125 MediaFile startSegment enc=null MediaFile[id=1280314 A[1232918,1229868,"Heroes",19630@0507.22:00,61] host=pvrmceo encodedBy=SGraphRecorder on 127.0.0.1:6969 DVD Standard Play format=MPEG2-PS 0:00:00 0 kbps [] E:\sage\Heroes-TheHardPart-1232918-0.mpg, Seg0[Mon 5/7 22:00:00.011-Mon 5/7 22:05:07.123]]
Mon 5/7 22:05:07.126 MediaFile created subfile:E:\sage\Heroes-TheHardPart-1232918-1.mpg MediaFile[id=1280314 A[1232918,1229868,"Heroes",19630@0507.22:00,61] host=pvrmceo encodedBy=SGraphRecorder on 127.0.0.1:6969 DVD Standard Play format=MPEG2-PS 0:00:00 0 kbps [] E:\sage\Heroes-TheHardPart-1232918-0.mpg, Seg0[Mon 5/7 22:00:00.011-Mon 5/7 22:05:07.123]]
Mon 5/7 22:05:07.153 MMC sent request to 127.0.0.1:6969 of START SGraphRecorder 1394|202|2357194214304|E:\sage\Heroes-TheHardPart-1232918-1.mpg|DVD Standard Play
Mon 5/7 22:05:13.641 MMC received response from 127.0.0.1:6969 of OK

This repeats about every five minutes until the recording is "over". Needless to say, I don't have a recording at the end of the show.

If I understand the above correctly, it seems to be implying that my cable box is simply not capturing a stream.

My first question is... why isn't SageTV telling me this? I would expect a message to show up in giant red flashing letters of flame when a scheduled recording doesn't happen. That's a critical event to me. I know that SageTV isn't to blame for my cable box not working but I would at least like to know -which- recordings I'm missing so that I can reschedule them or something. Right now it seems to silently give up. Is there anything I can do to see which recordings have completely failed in this way (short of grepping the log files for the string "TRYING TO RESET")?

My second question, I guess, is obvious. Is there anything I can do to improve the reliability of firewire recording? It seems that recordings before and after Heroes were successfully recorded on this tuner. I don't know of any way to force the device to reset, but is there something I can do to improve this situation?

As it is now, it seems like I might have to create a duplicate favorite for every recording so that if I happen to get an HD recording, good, but otherwise I'll still have an SD fallback. If thats even possible.

[UFGrayMatter]

Well, could be that you cable company has pushed an update to your box? I recently stopped getting firewire to work and made the HDHomeRun jump (couldn't be more satisfied).

Can you still get the streams through GraphEdit?

[deria]

Actually, it may be that something has drastically affected my cable signal. I don't see anything wrong on the analog connections, but the digital connection is AFU. I switched the TV input to view the feed from the cable box directly and its seriously broken.

I think tomorrow I'll re-cable. Having 8 tuners is nice, and worked well, but something has definitely gone wrong with my cable signal which leads me to think it might be time to scale back. One HD tuner + 2 regular tuners might be the way to go for the moment.

Alternatively, I suppose the cable box itself could have gone bad. that would be... unfortunate.