Two failed recordings, one good, same day. Blame tuner??

[rtrski]

System is running Sage as a service, with an HDHR dual tuner on a direct network connection (PCIx NIC in the server PC). Tuning on OTA HD digital broadcasts. Did the 'update' for the lineup etc. over that prior weekend, and as far as I could tell everything was right - recordings were clearly scheduled and I had guide data.

Just realized two of the three shows I record on Mondays didn't make it on 2/28. Harry's Law and Cape (first for the wife) both only show about 500MB filesizes vs. the usual 5 or so GB, while Castle (ok, I admit I like that one too...the chick is hot and Fillion is funny and still has Firefly acting cred ) recorded fine (verified its playable, and it was comskipped successfully). The failed recordings are on the same channel and would have been continuous so probably were both scheduled on one tuner, while Castle was started on the other simultaneous to the 2nd show. Trying to watch the failed recordings results in black screen for several minutes, with the occasional image showing up here or there if you click around the timeline (which itself is pretty broken, showing about 12min).

Logging was not on at the time, but there were no 'halt detected in recording' or 'failure to tune' system messages at the server. I only realized the files were borked after trying to watch one last night. I don't suppose there's any way without a log to tell what might have gone wrong?

I suspect this means one of the tuners has wrong settings somehow; although both were using same channel lineup. So I thought I'd go thru the wizard and reiterate both lineups, but I'm a bit worried now if one works I'll be borking the other.

Haven't done the 7.1.2 beta install - been reading a few issues with it and the WAF is low enough already with continual HD300 issues (will be a different topic - don't want to mix up this one).

Logging is now enabled. Any other suggestions besides clearing and redoing both channel lineups?? Her Desparate Housewives and Bros and Sis's (god I hate both those shows) are both scheduled for tomorrow, and if they get borked I'm sleeping in the den....

[sungod]

A few things come to mind:

1. Did you have the recordings that came on first set to stop XX amount of minutes after the show was done? I have more tuners than I need so I have my tuners record 1-2 minutes after a show is over. one day I reliazed I had accidentally set a show to start 12 minutes into a show. Took me a while to realize that. Check the favorites settings for the show that came on prior to the one with the problem as well as the show with the problem. That would make this an easy fix.

2. Is your tuner set to "always tune"? I do this with mine and if they do not start recording prior to a show beginning I can lose about 30 seconds.... big whoop but I like the fact that it tunes them in clearly before recording.

3. Since you mentioned having 2 tuners, were they being used for something else at the time... say, watching live TV, anything like that?

4. When I was running sagetv on an older system it was a VERY underpowered computer. I mean it does not take a lot to run sage, but my computer was really pathetic. When the PC got overwhelmed by comskip running or defrag or virus scan, etc, the recordings would suffer because the computer was too busy to record them properly. Playback was fine once it started but actual recording during busy PC/Hard drive usage was difficult.


Hope something in there helps.