SageTV Shuts Down on its own

[valerio]

Has any of you experienced SageTV 2.0 shutting down on its own with no errors or warnings?

I left it on last night recording a show and then at 3 am it was supposed to record another 2 shows and this morning I turn it on and SageTV is not running.

[Radar]

I had the same thing happen last night.

[stanger89]

Are there any hs_err_pid####.log files in the SageTV directory?

[valerio]

I can't see any .log file in the c:\Program Files\Frey Technologies\SageTV or anywhere else. I did restart SageTV so I am not sure if a log would have been deleted by the app.

[kny3twalker]

are you saying while sage is sleeping the program will just shut down and not be in your taskbar anymore?

cause it is possible that sage will record the program later on this week
and if it is a back to back recording youhave to set it for a manual recording because the guide provider does not do this correctly
(I had an issue last week with Frasier's last episodes)

But I have never seen sage just dissappear while sleeping

are you sure you did not crash it before this?


and I think there is no more log files since we are not beta anymore

[valerio]

The series of events were like this:

- I switched to Live TV, chose Star Trek III (show was half way into it) and pressed the record button (which I find is not working properly or very intuitively). Then let the system record and went to bed.

- Star Trek ended at about 2:30am and the back-to-back episodes of Wings were on at 3 and 3:30 am (They are in my Favorites and have recorded fine previosly, as did my Frasier 2 hrs. last Thursday).

- In the morning SageTV was off, and neither Star Trek nor Wings were recorded.

Since I am at it, can you tell me how does the record button really works? I seem to be confused. When I go to LiveTV and highlight a show (preview pops up) and press Record the outline becomes red, however it does not always show up in my SageTV Recordings. Does it refresh every so often and that is why I can't see it right away?

I also had a few freezes to the point of having to reboot the PC.

Thanks.

[stanger89]

It could be a rogue decoder problem, it doesn't sound like you put Sage to sleep. It's possible that your decoder crapped out on the channel/file/show change and took Sage with it.

[Deadbolt]

I have experienced the same thing. I have attached the error log. I have had this Java error with 1.4.2_03 also. I sent an email to Frey support yesterday but have not heard anything back yet (I don''t expect to hear back until Monday or Tuesday). I thought maybe someone else has seen this error. I have a PVR-350 outputting GUI and Video and software decoder off. The error usually shows up while Sage is displaying the screensaver...although I'm not sure it has only happened during screen saver. The error happens about twice per day and started with RC3....I just restart Sage as it does not lock my machine. There is no message displayed on the windows desktop when it crashes, and nothing in the windows event log....the only evidence is the log I am attaching. I have tried a fresh wiz.bin and also a new properties and found no joy.

Thanks!
Deadbolt

[Deadbolt]

All,

I wanted to post that yesterday Frey got back to me and said to uninstall, then reinstall the latest Java (1.4.2_04). I uninstalled, rebooted, reinstalled, rebooted, then started SageTV. Looks like this solved my problem. I'll post if it happens again.

Thanks!
Deadbolt

[valerio]

Support got back to me as well, indicating to do teh following:

============================================
One thing you can try is open up your Sage.properties file and look for this line similar to this,
"mmc/encoders/-xxxxxxxxxxxxx/never_stop_encoding=false". Set it to TRUE.
This line will be right above the line that signifies which capture card this is for. If you only have one capture card then just look for that line and change it. This should solve your problem with crashing at night.
============================================

So far last night the system did not shut down.

It does have the tendency of crashing when changing channel while it is recording though.

[Deadbolt]

I thought the release notes of RC1 or RC2 included mention that the bug that required the "never_stop_encoding" setting had been fixed. Is this not true?

[littlerm]

I am also having a problem with Sage shutting down at night with no error message. It's the only thing left that is keeping me from purchasing a license. Is there a fix to this problem yet? I have not tried the "never_stop_encoding" setting yet but will as soon as I get home.

[Deadbolt]

I want to report that upgrading to the latest Java as posted earlier reduced my "self shutdowns" from every 12 hours to about every 3-4 days. I have used "never_stop_encoding" set to both true and false without success.
I don't even get an error log now.

Very Annoying,
Deadbolt

[ickman]

I'm getting random shutdown issues as well. I'm a trial user and like the system better than BTV but i'll have to go back to snapstream if I can't get this resolved. As cool as it is it doesn't do me much good if doesn't reliably record anything.

Last night I set it to record Mars Attacks! and it recorded about 1.2 hours worth before crashing. I woke up this morning to find Sage TV wasn't running, I had 1.2 hours of my movie, and no error log (I'm not sure how smart using the Process ID for the error log is either). I started Sage TV again before heading to work and of course upon returning home found it not running again.

I was seeing a lot of DirectX errors in the log so I disabled anything DirectX related along with 3D acceleration. At one point I also saw an Access Violation in a call you made to nt.dll at one point. I'm assuming the crash is from something external to you since your not hitting an exception handler and generating a log.

I'll try the suggestions above along with switching around decoders and such but I just hope I don't have to criple the software in order to make it stable.

For reference I'm running a PVR 250 and a Radeon 9600 on XP home. All drivers and XP are upto date.

[Deadbolt]

How are you seeing these errors such as DirectX? I don't even get an error log when my SageTV crashes.

[mlbdude]

If you get an error in something outside of Sage an error log that looks like hs_err_pidXXXX.log is generated.

DirectX errors are a sure sign of something big wrong with you system outside of Sage. If a system reinstall is not possible, then at least reinstall DirectX and all drivers that use it.

[Deadbolt]

I don't even get the hs_err_pidXXXX.log ... I did before when I had a problem with Java, but not now.

[littlerm]

Well I reinstalled Java and tried the "never_stop_encoding" setting but it is still crashing for me with no error logs to be found and no Windows crash dialog, Sage just disappears. It's a shame, too, because I really like Sage the best of all PVR apps.

[buzzerbee]

mine disappearred from the task bar this am too. It's happened several times before but I hadn't paid attention to the pattern. Today's sequence was that I cold booted my PC, started sage (trial) and it was running in the taskbar. Started outlook, quit outlook, went away, started drive image 7 and sage quit at that point. I had never opened sage yet this am to look at any menus or recording guides etc.

[ickman]

The DirectX errors occured when I had the Video Renderer set to VMR9. Switching back to Overlay eliminated the occasional DirectX errors I was seeing and improved the overall picture quality as well. The Access Violation in nt.dll was occuring when I was trying to get ffdshow working. I gave up on that too. Now the only problem remaining is a random crash without an error log. I say random but I can't even keep it running for more than an hour or so without a crash.

I'm basically back to the standard Sage TV settings delta the following: ffdshow mods that I'm not using, installed Sonic decoder that I'm not using (I'm using InterVideo), and recomended PVR 250 custom qualities that I'm not using (I'm using the standard Best quality). I've also tried doing everything listed above short of re-installing Sage TV.

Since I'm on a trial account will I lose my account status if I attempt a re-install of Sage TV? I'm a developer so I can appreciate the effort it takes to stabalize a new product version but I'm not going to buy this until I can atleast keep it running for a couple of days.

I don't think my machines out of wack either. I have the latest drivers of everything and I have no problem keeping BTV running for over a day. In fact I'd switch back to BTV but their performance sucks. You guys rock when your running! If I did decide to do an OS re-install I'd probably just install MCE and be done with it.