ETH6 Recording & Tuner Issues

[JohnJ9]

I've written up a support ticket on this, but I thought I would see if someone else has run into the same situation before.

Win8Pro, ETH6, new PC, both firmware and Win8 drivers on current beta versions

I have set up multiple concurrent recordings a few times, and have also rigged all my record settings to start early and run over by 10 minutes (not when possible) in order to make sure successive recordings on the same channel don't result in truncation issues. Yesterday, I saw this occur twice, once while watching for it, and another time determined what happened based upon the evidence. Recording A on channel 709 was set to start at 4:30 and end at 5:30, while recording B on channel 729 was set to start recording at 5:00 and finish at 6:30. Both started five minutes early and ran ten minutes beyond. What ended up happening was at 5:40 recording A shut down, but immediately both it and recording B both were stopped on the client side, and recording B complained at the end that it had lost the tuner. On the ETH side, the tuner stopped for recording A, but it continued to stream for recording B, and it was set to stopped properly at 6:40, so some part of the layer cake knew to do this.

Having observed this taking place, I saw in my recording schedule this was going to happen again later on, and sat and watched various things as best I could. I find that there is no lag in both recordings being terminated: recording A stops its stream, and the packets on the ethernet card plummet from 30Mbps to zero immediately. There is no brief period of time where the system is busy chugging away on disk writing or something similar and eventually finds that it didn't get back to the stream in time. Instead, it's as though both streams are shut down immediately with extreme prejudice, and taking out stream A also takes out stream B. I have no idea what actually takes place, but both streams are shut down seemingly immediately and in tandem. There was no other viewing going on either on this PC or any other PC, and the only tuners being used were streaming to this PC making the recordings. In watching the Task Manager when this event took place, I fully expected to see the system dogging for a while and reaching some timeout point, but it was over in a flash, without disk activity or the like accompanying a sluggish PC. In fact, I watched with interest as the system ran through normal cycles, and there is an interesting occurrence (IMO) where, even though the parameters on a recording are to run over by ten minutes, WMC gets extremely focused on writing out everything buffered up for a show right as the show time ends, even though the recording is going to continue. There is heavy disk activity at the end of a show for a lengthy period of time, but both WMC and drivers continue to persevere and ride through it just fine. I think that's what makes it more surprising in some way that this other problem then occurs.

I was wondering if anyone else has been through a bout of this before. As I said, I did write up a support ticket on it, and clearly something is wrong, but it's rolling around in the back of my mind over the weekend.

[JohnW248]

The theory of forcing tuner swap (i.e. making MC use two tuners to make successive recordings from the same channel) is something that MSFT didn't build into Media Center. Some people have reported success with the technique you're using. Personally I have only seen this happen successfully when something else failed. For example if you SDV you can unplug the TA after the first recording starts and it appears the system will "forget" that tune and the next recording will start with an overlap. You don't even have to do anything beyond your normal start 2 minutes or 3 minutes early and end 3 minutes late. However the "normal" response in your set-up would be Recording A would start on Tuner 1 at 4:57PM and would End at 5:30PM and recording B would start on the same Tuner 1 at %:30PM and end at 6:03PM.

To make this really work, you have to force the use of two tuners, something that isn't coded in the program. It was something we discussed when there was still a eHome Group on the old Green Button and would have sessions with various MSFT Engineers. I forgot the name of the guy that wrote the tuner program, but he knew what tuner swap was and it wasn't in there. He also said that it wouldn't come as an update since it would require re-coding. OTOH this is a feature in the Tivo as long as there are tuners available.

John

Edit, this has been going on for a LONG time, here's a link to 2009 discussion http://experts.windows.com/frms/windows ... ageIndex=2

[JohnJ9]

Actually, my primary issue is that even a program being recorded from another channel kills both tuners, not simply that it's two shows from the same channel (e.g. the tuner recording channel 709 finished up and managed to shut down the stream for both itself and the tuner that was recording channel 729 prematurely). I imagine this might seem a bit muddled in my post, but the program ending on another station shouldn't take down the stream for a show that hasn't even reached its own programming end time, much less the overlap buffer that I added.

I'm disappointed to find no response at all from tech support, even though this was reported late Saturday night. Something is clearly wrong, and all the recording that was scheduled to be done today was killed off in the same fashion, whether from a second program on the same channel or one from a different channel.

[JohnW248]

Check the logs to see what might have been logged. The tuner log from the web gui itself, and Media Center from Event Viewer/Applications and Services/Media Center. You can also see what the logged cause was in Media Center, Recorded TV/Scheduled/History. Media Center might have a message like "recording stopped for use by another device". This also might be an network issue or router issue as well (classic issue with using ports on a router to connect the tuner and media center machine).

In short, that shouldn't happen. You might also want to start logging which tuners are in use when this happens and if two recordings are in progress start a live tv view and see if it also quits at the same time.

Remember this is a Holiday "week" and maybe Ceton is operating with a short staff for this period.

While I haven't seen this issue myself, it does sound like a network issue that some have reported in the past with other devices as well.