Lost chunks of recordings

[dooferlad]

Is anyone else suffering from bits of recordings going missing? Quite often I see red blocks in the progress bar at the start / in the middle / at the end of recordings where data is missing.

I am using DVB-T and have generally good reception, but sometimes it does break up. I wonder if when the signal is poor Sage gives up for a bit, which is not what I want at all! I would rather suffer a poor recording than have no recording!

[StephaneM]

Originally Posted by dooferlad

Is anyone else suffering from bits of recordings going missing? Quite often I see red blocks in the progress bar at the start / in the middle / at the end of recordings where data is missing.

I experienced this one or two times with DVB-T. I noticed then that the recording was splitted in two files. So I guess that it's a simple crash (one time the SageTV Service crashed and restarted for sure). It might be related to signal quality or any glitch in the signal decoding process (could be the hardware / driver / SageTV).

I'm not a specialist so I may very well be very wrong about this. But I think that even when the signal is good (strength and quality) it is always stuffed with errors. For example I have one DVB-T H.264 HD channel : signal is strong and quality is good. However it is unwatchable with some H.264 codecs and pretty decent with others: with old version of Cyberlink codec, it's unwatchable with macroblocks everywhere, with CoreAVC it is better, with new Cyberlink codec it's even better. That clearly shows that the way of handling the data is very important.

With SD MPEG2 SageTV does a pretty decent job, but there is some glitch every now and then. I guess it will improve if when can submit many bug reports, but it's kinda difficult to reproduce them and send out data to SageTV about these issues.

Note: I found that TS recordings are more reliable than PS recordings

Regards,
Stéphane.

[dooferlad]

Originally Posted by StephaneM

I experienced this one or two times with DVB-T. I noticed then that the recording was splitted in two files. So I guess that it's a simple crash (one time the SageTV Service crashed and restarted for sure). It might be related to signal quality or any glitch in the signal decoding process (could be the hardware / driver / SageTV).

I wonder if such things are logged... I may turn logging on and see...

Originally Posted by StephaneM

I'm not a specialist so I may very well be very wrong about this. But I think that even when the signal is good (strength and quality) it is always stuffed with errors. For example I have one DVB-T H.264 HD channel : signal is strong and quality is good. However it is unwatchable with some H.264 codecs and pretty decent with others: with old version of Cyberlink codec, it's unwatchable with macroblocks everywhere, with CoreAVC it is better, with new Cyberlink codec it's even better. That clearly shows that the way of handling the data is very important.

There is quite a bit of error detection and correction in DVB-T signals and if done right it does make a huge difference. I haven't worked with DVB-T myself, but I have written a demux for DVB-H which has even more error correction in it (something like 1/4 of the data is dedicated to it).

Originally Posted by StephaneM

Note: I found that TS recordings are more reliable than PS recordings

Interesting... could you tell me how to switch to TS recordings?

[StephaneM]

Originally Posted by dooferlad

I wonder if such things are logged... I may turn logging on and see...

Some parsing can be logged by creating a NATIVE_LOG.ENABLE in the Program Files/SageTV/SageTV directoy (and restarting SageTV).

Interesting... could you tell me how to switch to TS recordings?

You have to have this property in the sage.properties file : mmc/encode_digital_tv_as_program_stream=false

You recording will still be .mpg, but are really TS and may not play with Windows Media Player (it can plays with selected codecs allthough).

Regards,
Stéphane.

[carlgar]

Originally Posted by StephaneM

You have to have this property in the sage.properties file : mmc/encode_digital_tv_as_program_stream=false

The mmc part above is obsolete. You should just search for encode_digital_tv_as_program_stream and it should be a tuner specific option. You need to set it for each tuner that you want it applied to.

[StephaneM]

Originally Posted by carlgar

The mmc part above is obsolete. You should just search for encode_digital_tv_as_program_stream and it should be a tuner specific option. You need to set it for each tuner that you want it applied to.

You're right the program_stream property exists for each tuner. Though the mmc part is still working, because in my sage.properties every individual property for the tuners are set to "true" and my recordings are TS.

[carlgar]

I just assumed it was obsolete, I deleted my mmc version when I saw the tuner specific version.

[Narflex]

I HIGHLY recommend AGAINST changing this property (or other ones of the same name):

encode_digital_tv_as_program_stream

Please leave it at the default of true. There's been lots of support issues/bugs from people where changing this setting was the sole cause.

[ke6guj]

If we shouldn't be messing with encode_digital_tv_as_program_stream, is there any other way to designate different filename suffixes? Right now, my firewire recordings are set to "false" which sets the file as a .ts file instead of a .mpg when set to "true" (even though it is still a TS file no matter the setting). That way I can run ccextractor against only the digital recordings to extract CC for JREkiwi's CC import, since Sage doesn't do digital CC.

I'd like to be able to get the HDHR files to be something like .ps (haven't tried the BDA drivers yet) so I could have ccextractor run on all my digital recordings and leave my .mpg'ed analogs alone.

[dooferlad]

Originally Posted by Narflex

I HIGHLY recommend AGAINST changing this property (or other ones of the same name):

encode_digital_tv_as_program_stream

Please leave it at the default of true. There's been lots of support issues/bugs from people where changing this setting was the sole cause.

Do you have any advice on bits of programs going missing and how to stop it?