I've had this problem show up about a half dozen times since I built my box last year, but it's happened 3 times in the last month. MythTV stops recording about 5-10 minutes before a show is scheduled to end. The funny thing is, looking at the logs, MythTV THINKS it recorded the whole program. The logs show the program starting and stopping at the expected scheduled times (and nothing else interesting...not even a single log entry near the time where the show got cut off). The other program that was recording at the same time recorded in full. The harddrives were nowhere near out of space.

I'm running Knoppmyth R5A16. My box has a PVR-350 as the first tuner and a PVR-500 as the 2nd and 3rd tuners. I'm using IVTV 4.0. Any ideas what's going on? Is it MythTV that is responsible for writing output to the file, or is that handled by IVTV?

Are the recordings the correct length? Or does "60 Minutes" only go for 55mins.

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Paul Turpie
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<--Is your location in your profile? Why not?

Hi,
Is the computer clock correct? in a term $ date will give you the time readout.

Mike

Before the recording, Myth guide shows it scheduled for 30 minutes, from 10:00 to 10:30.

The myth logs show the recording starting on time at 10:00 and ending at 10:35 (I have a 5 minute post-roll).

The myth recorded programs list shows the time as 10:00 to 10:30

Mythweb shows the length of the program as 30 minutes.

When you start playing the program on myth and press play, the status bar shows the recording has a length of 24 minutes 30 second

playing the program from my windows box via the mythtv direct show filters shows the length is 24 minutes 30 second.

Hi,
Commercials?
Mike

Yes, the clock is correct, and the start time of the show was accurate (it started recording just seconds before the show came on). Shows recorded earlier in the day or the following day also recorded at correct times.

It's important to note that the myth logs CLAIM it recorded for 35 minutes, but the recording is only 24 minutes 30 seconds long.

Does the recording actually end after 24 mins or does it keep on playing to the full 30 mins?

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HP VL400 (PIII 866), Skystar2 2.6D, PVR350, Nvidia FX5200, 384MB, 200GB, KnoppMyth R5.5

It ends right at the 24min 30sec mark, even with the cut list turned off. And the direct show plugins (which don't support commercial skip, as far as I know) also reports 24:30. I just gave it a try on my media mvp too. The media mvp claims the show is 30:00 long, but at 24:30 the audio and video freezes while the timer ticks away.

Also, the timestamp on the nuv file is 10:24PM. The file size is 953339840 bytes, which is a bit small (my other 35 minute long recordings are 1394984896 and 1399285696 bytes). Bypassing myth and playing the nuv file through mplayer reports a running time of 24 minutes 31 seconds.

In other words, there is NO evidence that it recorded the whole show and is just misreporting the time. The file very clearly ends at the 24minute 30 second mark

Sounds like a good reason to try an upgrade

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HP VL400 (PIII 866), Skystar2 2.6D, PVR350, Nvidia FX5200, 384MB, 200GB, KnoppMyth R5.5

I'd love to upgrade it, but I don't really have a ton of time to spend with it if anything breaks and needs to be overhauled (or reinstalled from scratch). For now, I'm content to leave it as it is, but if someone knows a specific reason or fix for this problem I'd be willing to focus on fixing that.

One of my original questions wasn't answered...does anyone know what software is responsible for writing the data to the file? Does MythTV get the data from IVTV and then write to the file itself? Or does MythTV setup a file, pass that off to IVTV, and let IVTV write the data to the file?

If it's the latter, then
1) it would explain why MythTV isn't aware of the stop
2) I would take this problem up with the IVTV forum.

I guess my next step is to go try the mythtv mailing list.

Thanks for the help (or for at least trying) everyone.

I posted my problem to the myth-users mailing list. I got a useful response from someone. Apparently the IVTV driver fails somehow and stops providing mythtv with data. There is no way to fix this in myth (its an ivtv bug) but there is a patch to myth 0.19 which works around this by closing and reopening the ivtv driver. Apparently it only loses 1-2 seconds of the show when this happens.

Here's the thread where this was covered:
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/m ... 149#182149

I'm unclear whether or not this patch was included in the 0.19-fixes included as part of knoppmyth R5B7. I'm a bit nervous about doing updates when I don't have time to fix it if anything goes wrong. I might have to put this off a few months.

I'd try upgrading ivtv first (to 0.44) that may fix it. Otherwise its easy enough to install R5B7 and upgrade to the latest 0.19-fixes if necessary.
http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=9042

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HP VL400 (PIII 866), Skystar2 2.6D, PVR350, Nvidia FX5200, 384MB, 200GB, KnoppMyth R5.5

I also hit this problem when I did a trial install of R5B7. It's documented as an issue that occurs with multi-processing issues. When I disabled hyper-threading in my bios, the problem stopped occuring. Of course, this also means you don't get to take advantage of the parallel processing that occurs with HT enabled, but it is a work-around if you dont need the extra processing power. It also means you won't loose 1-2 seconds of the recording each time the problem occurs.

Marc

Except that I have a single processor Pentium III 450MHz. No hyperthreading there.