SageRecord Lock-Up

[Xleon]

I've had SageRecorder 'lock' on me a few times recently. It only responds to a close (or Task Manager!).

I've added the reg-key to get the console window to see if I could get some more info for you. The console window appears, but there is nothing ever displayed in it? When should I expect any debug to appear?

The lock-up normaly occurs when I am recording a clip and either pausing the live TV or playing it back. It hasn't happened yet when I'm just recording or just playing back.

For a test, I managed to record a 9 hour clip (total 12.5Gb) without any problems what so ever. But later when I tried to pause live TV, the UI would not respond and it looked like it had stopped recording as well.

I remember reporting the same fault with SageTV some time ago when I was evaluating both apps on a different PC setup but I couldn't repeat the fault afterwards until now.

[Xleon]

Not seem the lock-up in the past day or so, but I've found another bug!

The play-speed button doesn't work. The timer moves on quicker and the status line says (x4) or (x.25) but the video continues to play out at normal speed, though sometimes there is a 'blip' in the audio.

The 'Frame Advance' button works OK though.

I've also got a small question. I'm waiting for my Xcard to arrive. Do you get the preview on the Xcard, or do you have to start a recording and then press play to get the output on the Xcard?

[Narflex]

The play-speed button is decoder dependent. Some of them work better than others.

For the XCard, if you've got a Creative VBDVCR or Hauppauge PVR 250/350 then preview is the same as recording. If you've got a Provideo card, then they're different and preview won't show on the XCard.

[Xleon]

Thanks, I'll try some different decoders.

Damn, I do have the Provideo card (and now it works, I love it, best MPEG card I've used). Shame about the preview. Don't suppose it would be possible to treat the preview as a file or a pipe and output the stream direct to it instead of a file, thus, creating a preview?

I've got another issue, in that sometimes that SageRecorder won't respond to the mouse right-click on the record button, but will respond to a left click. This means I can't go in to the scheduler. Sometimes I can start a recording and stop it and it will let me in, othertimes I have to restart SageRecorder.

Sorry, but I have another one for the 'wish list'. When you schedule a recording, you but forget and happen to be watching/recording something else when the schedule is due to start, it doesn't inform you about the clash. It would be nice if it somehow alerted you to the fact.

Also, when you name a schedule recording, it doesn't add the 'MPG' extension like when you do a 'one-touch-record'. This means it doesn't appear in the list of MPEGS playable on the video disk.

It cleverly started recording late (when I restarted Sage), but only when I restarted Sage, not when I simply stopped the current recording. I hope that made sense!

[Narflex]

You can get the XCard to work on preview simply by hitting Record and then Play/Pause. It'll just be writing a file and reading from it to display it back on the XCard.

Thanks for the other feedback.

[Xleon]

I understand that, it just means I have to ensure I have enough free space to watch TV. If the drive is filling up etc., then I will have to revert to watching TV direct from the Satellite box and not through Sage.

That was the bonus about SageTV as it would record 2Gb then start again and if it ran out of room, it would overwrite and reuse the space whereas I'll have to either cancel the file made or delet the ones that have been used to watch TV.

As you can tell, I'm starting to use it quite heavily now so hence all the questions and points. I've come across another one.
When I bring up the preview window (not playing, just viewing live) I used to get the audio as well, but not now. It's as if the PV256T has not been told to enable the audio-thru to the sound card. Strangely though, after using it for a while, the audio came back and it worked as expected.

Rebooted the machine and it's gone again! Checked audio rendering, decoding, line-in levels in Windows etc. Is it Sage Recorder responsible to enabling the audio-thru on the PV256T when viewing preview?

[Narflex]

Check your live audio patch settings in Audio. It needs to be set to the audio input that the audio patch cable from the Provideo card is connected to.

[Xleon]

That's set correct. It records and plays back fine. It just doesn't seem to be enabling the audio on the preview to go out the PV256T Audio out socket. Yet, it worked for a while the other day.
I'll have to have a play some more as I'm sure it worked OK in my test PC.

I have one more suggestion for some time in the future. Would it be possible to select the method of entering a scheduled recording. At present you enter start/duration. I like start/end time record entry. A toggle in the setup between the two would be marvelous!

One last thing, is there a way to communicate to SageRecorder from an external app? I don't think it has an API, so the method I can think of so far is to get Windows to physically send key-presses to that window to simulate the user pressing them. I'm thinking of future expansion plans I have.

[dkardatzke]

See this post for a little more information on communicating with an external application. I know there's also another post out there as well but I couldn't easily find it.

http://www.freytechnologies.com/foru...=&threadid=340

[Xleon]

I've fixed the audio preview problem. It was the latest SBLive Unified Driver Package I installed. It seems to be buggy and took a few attempts to install properly (even a few BSOD which is not good).

All the audio now works correctly. Also, as a good update, I've not got SageRecorder to lock at all so I think the latest version seems to have sorted all those issues as well.

Having to re-start SageRecorder to get it to re-read the schedule isn't quite going to help my plans. I was thinking of starting work on an app so I could adjust the scheduler across the internet. Hence, if I'm at work and forgot to set the PVR, I could dial in!

[Xleon]

I did notice a few things with the scheduler the other day.
It said it had recorded a show correctly (and the file was on the disk). But upon closer inspection, I found out the file was empty. I had around 80Gb still free and the recording before it had completed correctly. They were not close together, there was around an hour betweem each show I recorded. Has this been seen before?

I've also noticed that once a scheduled program is recording, you can no longer go in to the scheduler and add more programs until it stops. It would be nice if you still had access to add more shows or adjust later ones.

There is a small bug in the sorting I think. When I asked the UI to sort the scheduled recordings in to time/date order, whenever I clicker one to edit it, it opened the program that USED to be at that position in the list. (ie. the order I adding them).

Also, I think I may have found another one. I need to confirm this, but if you schedule a recording for only a few minutes in to the future, it sometimes doesn't start that recording.

I'll continue to do various tests and see if I can recreate any of the above.

[Xleon]

Came home to find out of the 6 recordings I had scheduled, 2 had 'gone missing' and were not recorded and not in the list.
I double (in fact triple) checked that I had the times and dates correct so this concerns me a little.

Any other reports of this?

[Narflex]

Nope. No other reports of this. Can you give me any details on what failed and what worked?

[Xleon]

This is as best as my memory will allow...

Finished setting the scheduled recordings at 1:15pm Thursday 1st May. The list contained the following:

01/05 01:19 pm 'Comp Channel 1' for 40 minutes. (FAILED)
01/05 06:00 pm 'Comp Channel 1' for 1 hour. (OK)
01/05 08:00 pm 'Comp Channel 1' for 1 hour. (FAILED)
01/05 09:00 pm 'Comp Channel 1' for 1 hour. (WORKED)
01/05 10:00 pm 'Comp Channel 1' for 30 minutes. (WORKED)

When the 01:19pm failed to start, I shut down SageRecorder and
restarted it to see if it would read the schedule on start-up, realise it should have been recording and start from that point onwards until the end, but it didn't.

I only use composite input (the DSAT does the channel changing on it's own)

[Narflex]

That's interesting. Can you get any reproducibility out of this?

[Xleon]

As soon as I finish fighting the Xcard (see elsewhere!) I will try to reproduce this as much as possible.

I'm continuing to record things with it (even items I don't want) to prove to myself I can trust this new PC/software setup 100% so I will no longer have to use my VCR backup for my recordings.

(I currently set both the PC and my trusty VCR for all my important programmes) so I'll let you know if anything else happens. It's not that I don't trust Sage, but the whole PC/PVR/Hardware/Software combo is all very new.

I'll keep a note of all the recordings before I leave it running each time so I'll have exact times etc. for you.