Shows are getting cut short

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Judgeless

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Shows are getting cut short

#1

Post by Judgeless » Thu Jan 19, 2017 7:49 pm

I have been using MCE for many years and it has worked well. Over the last 3 months I have noticed that many shows are starting to get cut short. Example: I record ‘Fresh Off the Boat” that is a 30 min show. This is what was recorded

Episode 4 (1/10/17) 23 Min
Episode 5 (1/17/17) 18 Min
Episode 6 (1/18/17) 35 Min

Some shows record fine and with others I lose 5-13 minutes. The worse is if I look at ‘View Scheduled’ all the times for future shows are correct. But when it goes to record it is wrong

Space

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#2

Post by Space » Thu Jan 19, 2017 10:45 pm

What does it say in History about each of those recordings and why they stopped recording? (The History option is available from the "View Scheduled" page).

Judgeless

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#3

Post by Judgeless » Fri Jan 20, 2017 11:48 pm

Thanks for helping. All the shows I am having issues with in history show Partial Recording. Here is the error.

Recording of Free Off the Boat began late on 1/10/2017 9:07:21 PM due to a temporary failure caused by either a system malfunction or a power loss and stopped on 1/10/2017 9:30:00 PM.

It is not a power loss and other shows record fine. Any ideas?

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#4

Post by stuartm » Fri Jan 20, 2017 11:56 pm

Have you checked your Windows event log to see if your systems is possibly crashing and rebooting around that time?

Space

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#5

Post by Space » Sat Jan 21, 2017 2:38 am

You said the shows are being cut short, but your example shows that they are starting late, not cut short. You need to provide an accurate description of your problem if you expect anyone to be able to help resolve the problem in a timely manner.

One possible reason for your issue may be a corrupted "StartRecording" entry in the Task Scheduler, you can check this by following instructions in this post:
http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums/vie ... 11#p102911

But this is just a guess without more information about the problem.
  • Are all recordings with a truncation problem starting late, or are some ending early?
  • Are the recordings that "fail" also the first recordings in a series of recordings that don't have the issue? (e.g. you are recording at 8pm, 8:30pm and 9pm and only the first one (8pm) has the problem).
  • Do you put the system in standby when not being used?
  • Is the WMC front-end running when recordings are supposed to be recording?
  • Does the problem only happen around a certain time? Is there anything else automatically running at that time that might be interfering?

Judgeless

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#6

Post by Judgeless » Sun Jan 22, 2017 4:41 pm

You are correct. The problem is always with shows starting late. I checked the scheduler an it shows it is going to start the StartRecoding task 7 minutes before the next recording. I do not think that is the issue.

Are all recordings with a truncation problem starting late, or are some ending early?
They all start late

Are the recordings that "fail" also the first recordings in a series of recordings that don't have the issue? (e.g. you are recording at 8pm, 8:30pm and 9pm and only the first one (8pm) has the problem).
No they are usually in the middle of a series

Do you put the system in standby when not being used?
Never

Is the WMC front-end running when recordings are supposed to be recording?
Yes. I have a dedicated MCE server in the basement that always has the front end running. Shows are never watched on that server. They are watched on remote XBox360's

Does the problem only happen around a certain time? Is there anything else automatically running at that time that might be interfering?
It seems to happen with the same shows. There is nothing running on that PC except MCE.

adam1991

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#7

Post by adam1991 » Sun Jan 22, 2017 8:08 pm

Everything starting late sure sounds like all your tuners were in use for programs set to record late.

Judgeless

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#8

Post by Judgeless » Sun Jan 22, 2017 8:44 pm

Not everything is starting late. It seems like certain shows. There are no conflicts.

Judgeless

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#9

Post by Judgeless » Sun Jan 22, 2017 9:00 pm

This is a list of all my partial recordings this last week. May other shows get recorded perfect. These all started late.

Started 1/19/17 9:07:15pm - Chicago Med - 3.1 - Tuner 2 – Stopped 1/19/17 10:00:03pm
Started 1/19/17 9:07:15pm – Mom -19.1 – Tuner 1 – Stopped 1/19/17 9:41:48pm

Stared 1/17/2017 9:11:57pm – Moonshiners – 46 – Tuner 4 - Stopped 1/17/17 10:00:01pm
Started 1/17/17 9:11:57pm – This is us – 3.1 – Tuner 2 – Stopped 1/17/2106 10:00:00pm
Started 1/17/17 9:11:57pm – Fresh off the Boat – 5.1 – Tuner 1 – Stopped 9:30:00pm
Started 1/17/17 8:37:51pm – American Housewife – 5.1 – Tuner 1 – Stopped 9:11:55pm
Started 1/17/17 8:37:51pm – The Mick – 8.1 – Tuner 2 – Stopped 9:11:54pm

Started 1/16/17 9:07:21pm – 2 Broke Girls – 19.1 – Tuner 2 – Stopped 1/16/2017pm

All these shows are 30 min or 1 hour and are suppose to start on the 00:00 or 30:00

Space

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#10

Post by Space » Sun Jan 22, 2017 10:41 pm

It's interesting that with all those examples, the show either starts approximately 7 minutes late or 11 minutes late.

Do you have any shows that record on Tuner 3? I see that no shows in this list use Tuner 3. I know that if a tuner is "bad" WMC will try to use another available tuner. If the tuner failed in such a way that it is causing a long delay before it reports that it is bad, perhaps it can cause this issue (I'm just guessing here). What tuner device are you using?

WMC can be very mysterious, and I"ll be honest that I don't know much about how it works and how it can fail. The best I can do is search for similar problems that people have had in the past and hope that they found a solution.

Someone had a similar issue and discovered a Virus was causing the problem.

You can also check the event viewer for anything that looks unusual.

Another option is to use System Restore to restore the system to a point before the problem started (there might be corrupt files and this will restore good copies).

Others have had to reinstall Windows to fix similar issues, but this is only after you have exhausted all other possible solutions.

I would make a full image backup of your system before trying any of these things.

Judgeless

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#11

Post by Judgeless » Tue Jan 24, 2017 11:39 am

It is not always 7 or 11 min late. It changes. Last night this happen on one of five shows.

Started 1/23/17 8:45:21pm - Man With a Plan - 19.1 - Tuner 2 – Stopped 1/23/17 9:00:00pm

This morning I got a different error.

'Recording of Fox 9 News in the Morning began as scheduled on 1/24/17 6:07:46 AM while the program was already in progress' - It was set to record at 6:00am

Tuner 3 works fine. Tuner 1 and 2 record ATSC using an antenna on the roof. I only use it for HD locals. Tuner 3 and 4 are used for analog and Clear QAM cable channels.

I have scanned for a virus using different virus software and it comes up with nothing.

I will try a system restore after I clean up some shows and back up the drive.

DaveInPa

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#12

Post by DaveInPa » Tue Jan 24, 2017 3:06 pm

Here's a simple thing to try that might fix it.

Several months ago, some of us were finding that Amazing Race was not recording even though we had it set up as a series. Someone discovered that if we moved that series to the top of our priority list in "series" that everything recorded fine.

It seemed like it didn't make sense, but it worked. It's an easy thing to try.

Judgeless

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#13

Post by Judgeless » Tue Jan 24, 2017 4:00 pm

I just made 'Man With a Plan' number 1 on the priority list. I will see what happens next week.

Judgeless

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#14

Post by Judgeless » Thu Feb 09, 2017 6:49 pm

Everything I move to the top of the priority list it fixes. This is really an odd issue. If during the week a show does a partial recording I move it to the top and they next week it is fine.

Space

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#15

Post by Space » Thu Feb 09, 2017 8:42 pm

The only times I've seen shows start recording late is due to a corrupt "StartRecording" entry in Task Scheduler (like I already mentioned). In this case the recordings would start when you started the WMC frontend instead of when the Task Scheduler told it to start.

The other time is with the dubious feature called "enhanced conflict resolution" which will cut off the beginning of one recording if it overlaps with another recording. But this supposedly only happens if the overlap is 5 minutes or less. Also, when this happens, it does not log any entry in "History" (at least in my experience). If you use hard post-padding of 10 minutes I think this feature is disabled, but I am not sure (e.g. if one show stops at 1:01 and you add 10 minutes padding, and another show normally starts at 1:10 I am not sure if that second show might start recording 1 minute late at 1:11). This feature is a bit mysterious and I am not 100% sure how it works, for instance I THINK that it will only record the conflicting episode (and therefore result in missing the first minutes of it) if there is no other airing of that episode in the guide, if there is another airing, then it will record that instead.

Here is info on this feature. It is about Vista Media Center, but this feature is also in Win7 WMC:
http://blog.jasontsang.ca/2007/03/vista ... flict.html

The only thing I can think of from here is to look at that "StartRecording" task and see if it is being run when it is supposed to (see if there are any errors anywhere). It is supposed to be kicked off at 5 minutes before the recording is scheduled to start, and then it is supposed to start the recording 5 minutes later. Maybe this task is somehow being killed before that 5 minutes has elapsed, or maybe it is getting hung up somehow.

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