HD extender refuses to play wife's video a 2nd time

[drewg]

Hi,

I'm using an HD media extender directly connected to a Linux server. I'm using the latest version of SageTV (6.3.10), and the latest HD Extender firmware (20080204), and Sun's jre 1.6.0_04.

I'm having a very bizarre problem playing one particular recording I imported from MythtTV. We started watching it in the HD extender on Thurs night, and it played fine. It was an SD recording, but the quality was quite good. The wife was impressed. We turned it off with roughly 40 minutes left in a 2 hour show. This morning we tried to play it again, and it would not play at all in the extender. We could see the thumbnail, and when we tried to play the video the screen would essentially go black. Hitting info would bring up the timeline, and we could see that it thought it was playing from right where we left off. The video *will* play fine in a MacOSX placeshifter demo I downloaded specially to try to debug this. It picks up right where we left off, and it works great.

Also, the "real" video will play fine. This bears some explanation:

MythTV records videos using very cryptic filenames. There is no way a human would be able to easily find something using these names. I used a MythTV supplied script to make a directory with symlinks with meaningful names which point to the real, cryptically named files. Eg:

% ls -l /video/sage/ | grep Seeger
lrwxrwxrwx 1 gallatin mythtv 30 Mar 11 11:14 /video/sage/American Masters - 2008-03-02, 12-00 AM - Pete Seeger- The Power of Song.mpg -> /video/3041_20080302120000.mpg

I then pointed sagetv at the /video/sage directory as one of its video import directories.

When trying to debug this, I used the "browse" mode on the extender to directly play /video/3041_20080302120000.mpg. This worked fine.

I then deleted the file (symlink) from the extender GUI, recreated the link on the Linux box, refreshed the input dirs, and the "new" file appeared, and would play fine. I fast forwarded to 1:20, and stopped the playback. When I went to resume the playback, I had the same symptoms as before (no picture, timeline thought it was playing back the file). So I again "deleted" the file and recreated the link, in preparation for actually watching it tonight.

I've tried rebooted the HD extender (both via the "power" button on the remote, and via the power switch on the back of the machine). Neither helped.

Note that I've only noticed this problem with this particular video (so far). Other imported recordings are playing fine. This incident was particularly bad, since it was the first time I gave my wife the remote and let her drive. This has seriously hurt the WAF

Help!

Drew

[Madcoder]

The first step is to stop believing in this silly WAF concept. It is wrong on many levels. There are requirements, user acceptance, quality, etc....WAF means that you are in some kind of position that you needed to "sell" the idea to your wife or something. There are limitless combinations of encoders, settings, and etc. that a media playing software must play. I have not seen any Sage like application do them ALL without a problem once in a while. If you want to avoid that, then run all videos that might have a problem through a known good re-encode. Then you will have the super stable PVR/Media platform that so many people who talk about "WAF" are after, but then you will have spent a lot of wasted time when you could have told the nuances of such a system to your wife and avoided this whole "WAF" thing. I do not mean to offend you or anything, but the forever ongoing discussion about "WAF" is silly, and I start to wonder if anyone running Sage has a normal relationship or are the wives some kind of dictators or something.

Regarding not being able to play a particular video, I would submit a ticket to Sage, also asking for the ftp upload credentials, so you can send them a copy of the offending video. Often they will find something they can fix in the Sage side of the equation. Then again, sometimes you just get a bad recording. I have seen it even with commercial PVRs.

[mistergq]

I think that is a little harsh Madcoder. WAF is a very important factor. A lot of money is spent into this "hobby" that we have. If the wife is not on board, it makes our lives much more difficult.

these extenders are the best stb replacement solution I have seen since 2003. With that in mind, we need these extenders to work with little hassle, so when one of the wife's videos don't work, that is not the definition of little hassle.

[drewg]

Originally Posted by Madcoder

Regarding not being able to play a particular video, I would submit a ticket to Sage, also asking for the ftp upload credentials, so you can send them a copy of the offending video. Often they will find something they can fix in the Sage side of the equation. Then again, sometimes you just get a bad recording. I have seen it even with commercial PVRs.

I wasn't clear enough. It will play the symlink to the video the first time. It will play the "real" video as many times as i care to if I browse to it. It won't play the video the second time. This actually seems to be affecting all PBS recorded videos.

I'm now wondering if it has something to do with the symlink target (eg, the real file) not being writable to the SageTV server. Does SageTV want to write to the .mpg file of an imported recording?

Drew

[Madcoder]

Originally Posted by mistergq

I think that is a little harsh Madcoder. WAF is a very important factor. A lot of money is spent into this "hobby" that we have. If the wife is not on board, it makes our lives much more difficult.

these extenders are the best stb replacement solution I have seen since 2003. With that in mind, we need these extenders to work with little hassle, so when one of the wife's videos don't work, that is not the definition of little hassle.

Hi, yes I realize that, and yes I know it was a bit harsh, so is why I added the smilies, etc. because I was purposely doing so. Generalizations, like lumping everything about managing expectations, getting the significant other to realize the value in something, etc. into a term like WAF is a dangerous practice. WAF can be taken to mean many things, and it is better to explain. People are lazy in general, so it is easier to say something like WAF than to write out words, and like I said, I tend to discourage the practice. Once in a while I speak up on this. I also do not want to hijack the thread, so lets gets back to the problem...

[gblinckmann]

Originally Posted by Madcoder

I start to wonder if anyone running Sage has a normal relationship or are the wives some kind of dictators or something.

There's a difference?? (Only kidding!)

[benjamintm]

Originally Posted by mistergq

I think that is a little harsh Madcoder. WAF is a very important factor. A lot of money is spent into this "hobby" that we have. If the wife is not on board, it makes our lives much more difficult.

I don't think Madcoder was too harsh. The problem drewg was having wasn't a "WAF" issue, it was a video issue. I doubt drewg or any of us would have accepted the video problem regardless of being married or not. All of us wants our "hobby" to work without problems. The WAF seems to be an excuse to point out a flaw in a technology without saying we don't like it. It's kind of like the technologist equivalent of "a friend of mine has a problem".

Now I have to get back to my wife because the HD100 is acting up and she doesn't like that :-).

Ben

[gplasky]

It sounds like the issue is with the symlink. And Sage needs to be able to write to that directory for various reasons. Deleting the file later is one.

Gerry

[drewg]

Originally Posted by gplasky

It sounds like the issue is with the symlink. And Sage needs to be able to write to that directory for various reasons. Deleting the file later is one.

Gerry

It can write to the directory, just not the file. The directory (and symlink) are owned by sagetv. The symlink target is owned by mythtv. So it could delete the file (this works, I've tested it). But it could not modify the file.

I suppose the easiest thing to do will be to remove the link, and copy the file over and see if the behavior persists.

Drew