Problem with Blackbird/Roslyns

[fluffy]

Initially, I thought my problem was "Intelligent Recording" was stuck "on".
Come to find out that this is not the problem at all. I've made some inroads (thanks to much help (see all the helpful folks below, and I do thank you all for great input))

In the end, it boils down to this:

1 - My Roslyn/Blackbird cards (like many peoples') drop out audio all the time, if Sage is left running for a couple of days (which is kind of the whole idea behind Sage, eh?)

2 - I tried "Set never_stop_encoding=true", and for a while this worked. Of course its a really cheap fix, and keeps your hard drives churning 24 hours a day (not good), but it worked.

3 - Then I upgraded to Sage2.1, after Sage got generally buggy on me (a good excuse to upgrade). Wiped the hard drive, new WinXp, etc, etc.

4 - I set up never_stop_encoding=true , but NOW it not only records constantly (which was the point of the kludge to begin with), but now it won't back-track and clean up the mess, so...

5 - Intelligent recording is not on, and is not causing this.

6 - The seeker/clear_partials_and_unwanted_when_ir_off=true - so its not the partials seeker.

7 - My hard drives fill every 1-2 days, with insane amounts of random stuff I want to get rid of.

This results in:

1 - My hard drive churns constantly (wear and tear - expect a short hardware life)
2 - My hard drives fill constantly (continuous action required by me, the user, to trim back the countless infomercials and other random recordings)
3 - My "actual" shows (the ones I meant to record) are buried amid a sea of craziness that Sage is recording all on its own (I come home, and see "40 new shows", and 2 of them are the ones I want. That's no fun.)

All this because of the fix to the "sound problem"

- Jeff

[ToxMox]

The IR icon in Cayars indicates that the recording isn't a favorite or a manual recording. In most cases it is actually IR but in yours I assume it is because of the never stop encoding with a combination of Sage not deleting those Recordings automatically. There is no specific declaration for IR.

[Opus4]

Like ToxMox said, 'other' shows will display as IR in this case. Since you have IR tuned off, IR is not what is causing those shows to show up. The never_stop_encoding=true setting would cause it to just keep recording, since that is what it says it does. Perhaps you have seeker/clear_partials_and_unwanted_when_ir_off=false, causing those 'other' shows to remain?

The next possibility is that v2.1 changed things such that it won't immediately auto-delete scheduled recordings after the fact -- only nonscheduled live TV gets deleted right away. So, maybe it sees the shows resulting from never_stop_encoding as being scheduled shows & doesn't delete them. But, if more space is needed for a new recording, they should be among the first recordings to be deleted to make room: see Appendix C in the manual.

- Andy

[fluffy]

Actually, I have seeker/clear_partials_and_unwanted_when_ir_off=true. So that's not the problem.

The answer to the defective cards that Frey sent me is to make them never turn off (never_stop_encoding=true), so that my hard drives churn and crank away 24 x 7 year in, year out. (That's sure to wear out my drives prematurely, but sure, Ok, I do it anyway, cause Frey can't get the cards' audio encoding to stop flaking out)
Sage captures every conceivable show I don't want, and mixes the shows that I wanted in with countless unwanted shows. Wastes time deleting, wastes time searching for the shows I wanted, and fills da drives.

And still my sound drops out... can ya believe it!?


- Jeff

[glbrown]

Here is how I am setup and I'm not sure that it solves your problem but it might help.

I have IR turned on and the 3 video directories are setup to leave 20G free. When I shrink a DVD or do anything that creates files, Sage automatically deletes the oldest IR stuff to bring the drive back to 20G free. I never delete Sage files, it does it. Sage never requires any manual file maintenance. I never run out of disk space.

Map the Watched and Don't Like buttons on your remote and use them on every program you touch in the TV Recordings directory. When you see junk, tell Sage Don't Like. When you like something, mark it Watched even if you don't watch it. I use the Intelligent sort so Don't Like shows go right to the bottom of the list so you don't even see them.

If Sage keeps recording some stupid show, use Utilities/Applications/Viewing History to set all episodes of that show to Don't Like and Sage will stop recording them.

You will be surprised how fast Sage IR learns what you like. With a little bit of effort, IR is a very good thing

[Cayars]

Originally Posted by glbrown

Map the Watched and Don't Like buttons on your remote and use them on every program you touch in the TV Recordings directory. When you see junk, tell Sage Don't Like. When you like something, mark it Watched even if you don't watch it. I use the Intelligent sort so Don't Like shows go right to the bottom of the list so you don't even see them.

I wouldn't set it watched unless you actually did watch it. Otherwise, if it deletes the show it won't record it again and you won't ever get the chance to watch it in the future. If you don't mark it wathed and it gets deleted but later airs again, SageTV will grab another copy for you and maybe this time you'll get to wath it.

[glbrown]

You are correct. BTW, did you get the missing header in TV recordings fixed?

[Cayars]

missing header ? If this is concerning my STV, you're in the wrong forum. This is the SageTV forum.

[fluffy]

I appreciate the tips on Intelligent Recording. I think my original thread title was misleading, ad have re-vamped my first posting in the thread for better clarity. The real problem I'm seeing is something that is "simulating" IR, in its symptoms. But it isn't an IR problem at all (IR is off).

A brief description of my problem should read
"Roslyn Blackbird problems: Setting never_stop_recording=true is yielding unwanted files, and also not solving sound problem"

From what I can figure this is all being caused from something like what Opus4 said:
"The next possibility is that v2.1 changed things such that it won't immediately auto-delete scheduled recordings after the fact -- only nonscheduled live TV gets deleted right away." (Opus4)

I re-summarized the symptoms in the first posting to this thread (see first post), with a little more hindsight, and with some investigatin into the good ideas all a' you've been giving.

Still I'm stuck with a kludge for sound on the Blackbird/Roslyns that leaves me with hard drives wearing out, massive amounts of unwanted shows filling the drives, and now, even the sound problem (the one that the kludge supposedly fixes) is back.

So here I am, with all my Frey (tm) reccomended parts I bought in a bundle from Frey, and they don't work together.

- Jeff

[stanger89]

Have you tried to get your Roslyn's replaced?

[fluffy]

I would LOVE to get my Roslyns replaced.


On a lighter note: I clearly have the sexiest cat in the forums... ok, maybe not as sexy as ToxMox's cat, but still...

[Opus4]

Have you followed up with tech support on this? And/or have you tried the latest beta? Save a copy of the entire Frey dir, install the beta, see what happens, uninstall beta if more problems, reinstall old version, & then copy back original Frey dir.

- Andy

[SHS]

Hi fluffy when you say drop audio I wondering is this also in MPEG file them self.