recording missed due to capture device failure

[MickBurke]

I've gotten these every now and then since building my Sage 7.x server using both a Ceton / SageDCT and a Hauppague card (for QAM), but in the last week or so it's gotten worse. (I missed revolution for crying out loud!). In any event, I am not sure where to look. I made sure the drivers were all up to date (Updated the Ceton drivers). Previously when i would get a failure, I would restart the server and then be OK for however long (a week, a month...), but the last few days I missed one or two, restarted adn the next day missed one or two. It happens on BOTH devices (meaning both (or I guess either) on the Hauppague and all the inputs on the Ceton). And when one tuner fails the other or others still work (meaning I get a failure to record on tuner 1 on the ceton, but the other tuners still record.

I'm not sure if these vary, but currently the whole error is "The device input "SageDCT-Ceton InfiniTV PCIe (00-80-25-63) Tuner 4 on 127.0.0.1:6973 Digital TV Tuner" failed to record "---show title---" on TRUTVHD on physical channel 683 at Tue 10/9 16:00. The TV Source for this input may have become disconnected, powered off, has lost its signal, the channel is no longer available of the device is failing"

The SageDCT appears to be out of date, so I'd like to update that, but it looks like that may require me to redo all my channel setups? Is this accurate? Is there a step by step for upgrading this that's reasonably easy to follow?

Are there any other possibilities of what might be wrong? Should I update windows or Java? I'm always hesitant on either with the sage system.

Any input or recommendations are MUCH appreciated!

Mick

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by MickBurke

I've gotten these every now and then since building my Sage 7.x server using both a Ceton / SageDCT and a Hauppague card (for QAM), but in the last week or so it's gotten worse. (I missed revolution for crying out loud!). In any event, I am not sure where to look. I made sure the drivers were all up to date (Updated the Ceton drivers). Previously when i would get a failure, I would restart the server and then be OK for however long (a week, a month...), but the last few days I missed one or two, restarted adn the next day missed one or two. It happens on BOTH devices (meaning both (or I guess either) on the Hauppague and all the inputs on the Ceton). And when one tuner fails the other or others still work (meaning I get a failure to record on tuner 1 on the ceton, but the other tuners still record.

I'm not sure if these vary, but currently the whole error is "The device input "SageDCT-Ceton InfiniTV PCIe (00-80-25-63) Tuner 4 on 127.0.0.1:6973 Digital TV Tuner" failed to record "---show title---" on TRUTVHD on physical channel 683 at Tue 10/9 16:00. The TV Source for this input may have become disconnected, powered off, has lost its signal, the channel is no longer available of the device is failing"

The SageDCT appears to be out of date, so I'd like to update that, but it looks like that may require me to redo all my channel setups? Is this accurate? Is there a step by step for upgrading this that's reasonably easy to follow?

Are there any other possibilities of what might be wrong? Should I update windows or Java? I'm always hesitant on either with the sage system.

Any input or recommendations are MUCH appreciated!

Mick

I'm in a kind of similar boat like you...last week my Hauppauge Nova HD DVB-S2 cards started to fail showing exactly the same message like yours, so I went to check the sources and magically two unknown sources that I never seen before appeared. I tried to fix it, but nothing, eventually I took the plunge and upgraded the 4 x Hauppauge with 2 x TBS 6984 Quad DVB-S2 (I was postponing this for a while) and not only the same issue, but now is worse, I have warning on resetting devices that I never seen before...

The thing is that nothing has changed on the server...at all! I suspect an hardware failure...

Eddy

[MickBurke]

Thanks, I'm expecting it's not hardware since it's both cards at different times. Don't want to rule it out, but not eager to start there if anyone else has any other possibilities...

[Dargason]

I'm just guessing, but I saw this kind of thing quite often when my server PC was doing double-duty as my main home PC. It completely vanished when I built a dedicated server for SageTV. I read in a couple places that SageDCT requires a lot of CPU 'headroom' and assumed it was related to that.

[MickBurke]

Hmm, it is a dedicated system. Pretty stout, core2 Quad, 2.66, 6 gig of memory, 600Gig free out of 3.6TB...

[Dargason]

Maybe not that then, unless it seems more common when more of them are busy than when just one is.

Do you have a tuning adapter? I get this error when it's on the fritz. I have to power-cycle it to clear it.

The other possibility might be that the signal provided to you by your provider has degraded somehow and you're simply getting more errors than you used to. I don't have any of the devices you mention, but I'm not confident that my Hauppauge DCT-2650 deals with the errors very well.

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by MickBurke

Hmm, it is a dedicated system. Pretty stout, core2 Quad, 2.66, 6 gig of memory, 600Gig free out of 3.6TB...

I have a dedicated system like you, but still...

I suggest to have a look at your Windows Event viewer log, I discovered a SageTV application not responding error at about the date/time of my first failure.

Eddy

[IM2BZ2P]

I'm having the same issues, primarily when I try to record two shows at the same time. I just installed the Ceton internal card and a cable card. Have never been able to record more than one show at a time, which kind of defeats the purpose of a multi-stream card and 4 tuners. Having read through the forum posts here, I need to spend some time next weekend trying answer these questions:

1. do I need to do a fresh install of SageTV
2. is my hard drive able to keep up with the data stream
3. do I need a fresh install of Windows 7
4. should I delete Sage and try WMC to see if it has the same issue

I have a quad-core machine with loads of memory. Any other ideas?

I did not have this problem when I had an internal tuner card and an HD-PVR. It has only happened since I got the cable card. I took back the first cable card thinking that was the problem.

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by IM2BZ2P

Have never been able to record more than one show at a time, which kind of defeats the purpose of a multi-stream card and 4 tuners.

This is exactly what puzzles me, before I had 4 single tuner cards in four separate PCI slots and no problem whatsoever (well apart that glitch a couple of weeks ago), now I've got two multituners cards and I'm not able to record two/three programs simultaneusly from the same card, but what is even more interesting is the fact that it always fails once within the first couple of minutes, then the card gets resetted (yellow icon warning) and the recording proceeds right until one of the programs ends and at that point I've got another reset (another yellow icon warning).

It looks like that Sage has problems with multituner cards in general, ragarding the HDD speed, a typical HDD can sustain 35/40Mb write per second, if you consider that an HD DVB stream is about 1Mb per second there should be plenty of bandwidth and I'm running my recording drive in RAID0 so double the bandwidth.

There are some "seeker/" properties in the Sage.properties that I guess can be used to tweak timeouts, maybe the default values are too conservative?

Eddy

[IM2BZ2P]

I see the same behavior, i.e. yellow error one minute in and then the red alerts start. I'm thinking I need to reinstall SageTV. The .properties file may have too much encoder information in it.

I downloaded the latest DCT this morning (2.60) and installed it. If I understand the instructions correctly, I need to generate the assignments and the copy the lines in the text file into the .properties file. I am assuming that I should replace all of the lines starting with "mmc/encoder", not add to those lines.

I'll let you know what I learn.

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by IM2BZ2P

I see the same behavior, i.e. yellow error one minute in and then the red alerts start. I'm thinking I need to reinstall SageTV. The .properties file may have too much encoder information in it.

I'll let you know what I learn.

I don't use DCT, but I can see where this thing is going...it maybe possible a bottle neck in the system somewhere that makes the SageTV seeker timeout kicking (currently 15 seconds) and the halt alert (RED icon) timeout kicking (currently 60 seconds).

But I found this coincidental, too many people having the same problem recently...

EDIT:
forgot to ask, did you see any video during the first minute or so?

Eddy

[Skirge01]

I had this issue this past weekend (Sunday evening, I believe), but a quick reboot of my entire system (hardware firewall, switches, server, clients, etc.) resolved everything. When my HDHR's couldn't even record, I knew it wasn't a hardware issue.

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by routerunner

I don't use DCT, but I can see where this thing is going...it maybe possible a bottle neck in the system somewhere that makes the SageTV seeker timeout kicking (currently 15 seconds) and the halt alert (RED icon) timeout kicking (currently 60 seconds).

But I found this coincidental, too many people having the same problem recently...

EDIT:
forgot to ask, did you see any video during the first minute or so?

Eddy

OK, I think I know what is going on...if you keep an eye on the "Performance" monitor (on XP in Control Panel > Administrative Tools), the default graph has three objects (Memory (pagefile), Avg. Disk Queue, %Processor), then you'll notice that everytime you tune into a channel the "pagefile" and "Avg. Disk queue" go quite high and when they reach the top for few seconds (15) the tuner will fail as there is too much I/O.

Is not an uncommon issue, google it and you'll see...

This is something I'm going to play a little but, but how's your current "Enable write caching on the disk" setting for your recording drive? Is it enabled or disabled?

Eddy

[IM2BZ2P]

Reinstalling DCT after cleaning out all of the old mmc/encoder entries in .properties appears to have fixed it. I recorded two shows simultaneously earlier and am now recorded 4 shows at once. 6 minutes in and no errors. Will continue to test over the next couple of days. I am not declaring victory yet, but am encouraged.

I still think a clean install of SageTv will be healthy.

[phelme]

Originally Posted by Dargason

... SageDCT requires a lot of CPU 'headroom' and assumed it was related to that.

Unless you get a NIC that offloads the work to itself, like the Intel cards. I had nothing but problems with Realtek chipsets and high CPU usage with SageDCT.

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by IM2BZ2P

I still think a clean install of SageTv will be healthy.

I don't want risk to corrupt the Wiz.bin...to many metadata to count

Also, I reckon our two situation are different.

When I had the Yellow and Red icon it was because a problem in the SageTV properties whereby the lineup and the physical tuner allocation where mismatched (I had two mysterious tuners appearing in the source list), that was causing the tuner not being initialized properly (which I think is what happened to you as well), so by re-installing SageTV you fixed it (in reality removing any reference to the tuners and the mmc/ section was sufficient).

My case is different because after installing two new tuners, hence fixing the "Sage.properties" issue as well, I didn't have any Red icon anymore (hence no halt), but just the yellow icon after 1 or 2 minutes of recording which causes SageTV to re-initialize the tuners which causes the tuners to continue recording the whole program correctly. I think I've already identified my case as an overload in the I/O system which I'm addressing.

Eddy

[ex-tivoman]

I had the same problem. I upgraded to WHS 2011 and added a new 3TB drive. I didn't realize that WHS would require me to split the drive into 2 partitions. Not really a problem, but not what I had planned.

Anyway, shortly thereafter I kept getting the "Halt In Recording" errors, and "Capture Device Errors" identified above.

I tried a number of fixes, identified in other threads. Ultimately, replacing the drive fixed the problem.

I had been using a WD30EURS (Western Digital 3 TB AV-GP 3 TB SATA 2 Intellipower 64 MB Cache). It is advertised as a great Audio/Video drive able to support 12 streams at a time. My guess is the "intellipower" feature doesn't spin up the drive fast enough to begin recording as the SageTV service requested. Whenever the programs would actually record, the first 1-2 minutes would be missing.

I switched to a WD1001FALS (Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB, 32 MB Cache, 7200 RPM SATA II).

24 hours now with no problems and able to record 4 streams at once without a hiccup. No delayed starts, no halts, no capture errors. Absolutely everything the same except the drives.

[darcilicious]

Yeah, I stay away from any "green" or "intellipower" drives when it comes to recording drives...

[MattHelm]

Weird, I don't have any drives that aren't green to record to, and haven't seen an issue like this.

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by MattHelm

Weird, I don't have any drives that aren't green to record to, and haven't seen an issue like this.

You're right, is way more subtle than that...it is more a combination of motherboard, PCI/PCIe bus controller, IRQ allocation (whether your SATA controller has the same IRQ of your tuners and network interface), size of HDD cache and whether the "delayed write cache" is enabled or not (disabled is recommended), Windows pagefile size...

If you use the "Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Performance" you can check lots of counters and how they contribute to lock down the recording just enough to kick in the seeker thread timeout...

Eddy