SageTV 9 Live TV Not Working on Windows 10 Creators Update

[nerdindenial]

When I installed the Windows 10 Creators Update (version 1703 Build 15063), my hacked version of Windows Media Center quit working. So I uninstalled WMC, installed LAVFilters-0.69-x64, and installed Sage TV V9.1.1.651 for the very first time. I can play MPEG2 videos in the Client. After setting up the server and the client I noticed that the Live TV display is always black and the volume control is inoperable (i.e. I never see any sound nor picture). I do see the Schedules Direct program information at the top and the recorder controls at the bottom of the Live TV display. I am using an old HDHomeRun tuner (works fine with Windows Media player). I installed the Version 1703 MPEG2 decoder from Microsoft, but am not sure how to select it.

Under detailed setup -> Video/Audio I tried a number of Video Decoder Filters and Renderers, but it seemed to make no difference.

I turned on debugging but I don't see any smoking gun (maybe I don't know what to look for). Attempting to record a program results in a 0-length MPG file.

I have attached the log where I was trying to watch the Larry King show. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

[EnterNoEscape]

Can you post sagetv_0.txt? The details of the actual channel tuning will be in there.

[nerdindenial]

sagetv_0.txt is attached here.

Thanks!

[graywolf]

Had same problem with 651 using a hvr-1600
I uninstalled 651 and reinstalled using the 9.0.13 installer and it worked again for live tv but I had issues trying to switch to Schedules Direct

[graywolf]

Another difference is I'm on Win7 but the Sage versions match for this issue

[EnterNoEscape]

It has been a while since I did things the "right" way in Windows. Is the .frq file required for the HDHomeRuns to be usable at all? I'm asking because I see the line

Failed loading frq file Silicondust HDHomeRun Tuner 1020A3F1-0-0-ATSC.frq

in the log and I'm wondering if that file missing will actually cause the entire tuning process to fail. I'd appreciate it if another forum member that uses this the right way can comment on this.

I know that file would be created via the HDHomeRun software, so as a troubleshooting step, I would run their software and set it to use SageTV. This might fix your problem.

[EnterNoEscape]

The other thing that has been driving me nuts with this issue is that in the logs it looks like the person testing let it tune in and stopped playback in less than a second. Is that correct in your case? Did you tune in and stop it immediately. If that's the case, please tune into the channel and let it sit there on the blank screen for at least 10 second before stopping playback. I'm not sure I'm seeing the full scope of the issue when playback is stopped that quickly.

[EnterNoEscape]

This issue has been identified and a fix is submitted. If you want to get going before a new version of SageTV is released, try just marking any random airing watched. After you do that, you should be able to tune into anything. See this thread if you're curious why this works.

[nerdindenial]

Setting a random viewing to "watched" did indeed work around the issue for all channels using my old HDHomeRun/ATSC - thank you!

The only anomaly I see now is that every show is being recorded - I can't seem to turn off recording for any channel. Maybe I have something set wrong, but I haven't found it yet.

[EnterNoEscape]

That sounds like intelligent recordings is enabled.

[nerdindenial]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

That sounds like intelligent recordings is enabled.

No, Intelligent recordings are disabled in detailed setup.
So any show I tune to is being recorded. The only way to turn off recording is to do 2 steps:
1. Start recording the show (even though it is really already started)
2. Cancel recording.

[EnterNoEscape]

Oh. They should stop recording within a few seconds of you stopping. This used to be something people complained about, so there's a step in Seeker that checks if you're not watching live TV and it's not scheduled in any capacity, stop the recording. I wonder if that doesn't work quite right without anything actually scheduled.

SageTV is a little unique in that when you tune into live TV, it actually the exact same actions as if you started a recording. It doesn't use buffers like most PVR solutions. It actually records to the file that would be the real recording and when the next airings comes up on the channel you're watching live, it starts a new file for that airing and jumps seamlessly over to the new file.

[nerdindenial]

I tried scheduling a recording in the near future and then restarting the client and watching a different channel on live TV. When I exited the client the unwanted/unrequested mpg for the live TV session was present and never got deleted. This is the behavior I always see. So every time I watch live TV I'm left with large mpg file(s) in the recorded TV directory. This is a bit more of a concern with a small, expensive consumer-grade SSD like I have.

On the bright side, the scheduled recording seems to be working fine at the normal rate of about 6GB/hour with the client disconnected.

I found that setting "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Frey Technologies\SageTV\JVMMaxHeapSizeMB"=dword:00000800" (2GB) prevents the service from starting, so I set it to 1 GB (0x400 MB). It also seems like ~the same debugging information is being created whether or not debugging is turned on in the application. I have debugging OFF now.

In the Recorded TV directory I found the attached "20170531.log" file. It seems to indicate that SageTV (or perhaps HDHomeRun) is confused about what PVR service it should be using. I don't have any account or PVR/DVR service at either HDHomeRun or SageTV. Perhaps this is contributing to the problem? Thanks.

[EnterNoEscape]

My vote would be the HDHomeRun software defaults to their own DVR software. You should be able to set it to SageTV. I've never seen that kind of log before, but it looks like it's trying to reach out to their own DVR software and has no interest in the existence of SageTV.

You need not worry about those files left behind, they will be cleaned up. Some of this is Windows' fault because it has a tendency to get a lock on video files and other media that it recognizes until it finally gives up trying to generate a thumbnail. SageTV is smart about this and first tries to rename the file so the OS will stop trying to read it and regardless of if that succeeds or not will slowly shrink the file until it is 0 bytes. After that it will try to delete it periodically until it succeeds.

The JVM heap size cannot go higher than 1GB. This has always been a limitation of SageTV. To me, it's unclear if this is a JVM issue or something native in SageTV imposing this limitation. I can just say that everyone here will tell you that you can't reliably go above 1GB in Windows.

Debugging is permanently on. The UI button should really just be removed.

[nerdindenial]

Thanks for the timely assistance!