3 Hour Limit on Recordings????

[james_k_p]

Hey Guys,

I'm getting really frustrated with SageTV. For the 2nd week in a row, I have it set to record a football game, from 12pm - 3pm. I told it to start 4 minutes early, and end 15 minutes late.

For some reason, at almost 3 o'clock the video stops playback, and a box comes up saying about do I want to delete the file, cancel or something. I tell it to keep the file, but now I'm missing plays and sage is freaking out.

Is there some limit or something I can turn off that this is happening with? I am totally pizzed off about this and I want to uninstall sage and never touch it again.

Can anyone help me with what's going on here??

[MeInMaui]

Is your hard drive full? Do you have all of your favorites set to keep until you delete them? A debug log from when this happens would be helpful.

Aloha,
Mike

[james_k_p]

No, over 20 gigs free on the harddrive.

I'll have to enable that log for the next time. I don't have it enabled as I've never had to use it until now.

From what I can tell, Sagetv sees that my recording is 3 hours, and when the game is schedule to end, although I have it set to go longer, it freezes playback and asks if I want to delete the file to free up harddrive space, or keep it. But it should ask that at all unless I am running out of space which I'm not.

I wonder what it would do if I didn't have it open and the video running and I had sagetv running only in the system tray..

[MeInMaui]

Ok, so you are running out of hard drive space based on that message. SageTV probably doesn't wait until your drive is completely full to start deleting recordings to make space. I'm sure it always keeps a minimum amount of space free as a buffer. Sounds like it's time to add a hard drive or delete some unnecessary recordings.

Aloha,
Mike

[james_k_p]

I would have to believe that the message is false when I have 20 gigs of free space available. Therefore it must be something else.

[Menehune]

You can set sage to always leave xxGB free on the drive. Maybe you are reserving a portion of the HD? Do you have an undelete program like Norton's on the PC?

[GKusnick]

A more complete description of your setup, including any third-party customizations you have installed, might help narrow down the cause of the problem. The exact text (or screenshot) of the message you're getting might also ring a bell with someone.

[james_k_p]

I personally haven't set anything. It's default from the original install.

I"m currently doing another test on the pats/jets game and in 4 minutes at 6pm, I will see if it will do it again.

[MeInMaui]

Make sure to enable debug logging first.

[james_k_p]

Well that last test didn't work because the video froze during the game. So I waited until a commercial came on thinking that although I could see no video on the sagetv it might still be recording...then I shut down sagetv, restarted it...and sure enough, it was still recording. BUT..

Because I did that, now the game is seperated into 2 mpg files. Therefore it never had a problem. I'm guessing after 3 hours or so the file hits 20gigs and at some point after that it has the problem.

So I'm redoing the test with this sunday night game and no matter what it does, locks up, messages, whatever, I'm gonna let it record until 10:45pm my time and see what happens.

As we speak I have 53.7gigs of free space. So even after it reaches 20gigs in size, I should have over 30 gigs left which will totally rule out space.

I didn't turn on the logging before I started though...so I know you can't help without that, but it is what it is now because I don't want to stop it.

Hopefully it simply is a space issue and now that there is an extra 10 gigs on it, maybe it won't occur at all. <shrug> I'll let you know what happens later tonight.

Oh by the way, this is using the HDHomerun, not that it matters much.

[MeInMaui]

Originally Posted by james_k_p

Oh by the way, this is using the HDHomerun, not that it matters much.

Actually that matters a lot. I'm assuming that the game is in Hi-Def, so it is probably buring through hard drive space at a good clip, like maybe 7GB/hr. If that is the case, then a 3hr game would take 21GB. Or to put it another way, you would burn through your 20GB of space in just under 3hrs. That just reinforces my belief that this is a space issue. I suspect you will not have this issue with the additional space freed up. (unless you have other recordings scheduled that will fill up the space or the game lasts 8hrs)

Aloha,
Mike

[james_k_p]

Originally Posted by MeInMaui

Actually that matters a lot. I'm assuming that the game is in Hi-Def, so it is probably buring through hard drive space at a good clip, like maybe 7GB/hr. If that is the case, then a 3hr game would take 21GB. Or to put it another way, you would burn through your 20GB of space in just under 3hrs. That just reinforces my belief that this is a space issue. I suspect you will not have this issue with the additional space freed up. (unless you have other recordings scheduled that will fill up the space or the game lasts 8hrs)

Aloha,
Mike

Yes, a game ends up being around 24gigs if it would finish complete.
I am starting this game with almost 60 gigs of free space.

[Opus4]

SageTV doesn't pop up a message asking you to delete a recording if space is low, though a recording would stop if space runs out. But, it sounds like it is always ending when the scheduled airing is over. The dialog is simply shown at the end of a recording when not in live TV mode.

Are you trying to watch these shows live, or after the show is over?

Is this a Favorite or a Manual Recording?

If it is a Favorite, is there something scheduled to record after the game on the same channel? If so, check to see if you have this option enabled or not: Detailed Setup -> Customize -> Remove padding on back to back Favorites on the same channel.

And, if that isn't it: rather than just guessing at what is happening, you really ought to try it while debug logging is on, as mentioned above.

- Andy

[james_k_p]

It's always a manual recordings. I don't use Sagetv as my everyday DVR you might say. I have 2 Dish Network DVRs for that. I use it strictly to stream media to the HD100, and to capture football games. So I do not use favorties at all.

Being that it's manual, I have the sagetv open "watching live tv" as it's recording. Should I not do this and just keep in minimized in the system tray?

It seems when this message pops up, I can still go to my computer, bring up this drive, and it shows over 20 gigs of free space. So I knew it wasn't a space issue.

But then again, maybe it is. <shrug> The test I did tonight on Sunday night football worked flawlessly. It recorded all 3 plus hours, plus the extra 15 minutes I told it to, all to one mpg file. I don't know what the difference is between this and my afternoon recording, but it's really annoying.

I wish I had screen capped the ? box, but I was in a panic trying to get it going again. When this box comes up though, it seems that all recording and viewing live tv is halted. I'll definitely turn off debugging next sunday. What I'm thinking of doing next time though since I really don't want to take changes is instead of extending the time of the manual recording, just telling the very next show to be a manual recording as well. And when the game is over, I'll just tell the recording to end as early as the next minute to stop it properly.

[GKusnick]

Instead of waiting a week between tests, you could try picking any random program to record and adding a couple hours of padding to the end of it. That way you don't need to worry about losing anything you care about while troubleshooting.

[jchong]

Originally Posted by james_k_p

...Is there some limit or something I can turn off that this is happening with?...

I was able to record 5+ hours of the 2008 Olympics in 1080i (using a Hauppage 1600). The filesize came out to about 45GB so I don't think there's a filesize/time limit.

Can you go to your SageTV settings and tell us your "Diskspace Usage Rule":

Setup Menu => Run Configuration Wizard => Configure TV Recording => NTSC / PAL => continue until you get to the screen titled: "Video Recording Directories"

You might have it set as "Leave 20.0GB Free".

[sic0048]

Did freeing up more disk space make a difference? I also think it is a space issue. If you don't normally use Sage as a DVR, then the other files on the system may not be deletable by Sage. So it would make sense that it would quit after running out of space. Also, with the new 6.4 version, the HDHomeRun really chews up the disk space - much more than before. So this may explain why it may have worked in the past, but doesn't seem to work now. It is a problem that they are working on to prevent recording of all the data including stuff that doesn't pertain to the show being recorded.

I know Sage can and will delete files it previously recorded (if you allow it to) to free up space. This was tested during the Olympics for me as I also got super large files with no problems. Some of the files were 8 hours of HD recording, so you can image the size (40-50gb and larger was normal). I bought a 750gb drive just prior to the Olympics starting, so I had plenty of space to start out. But I eventually lost files like the the opening ceremony because I didn't tell Sage not to delete them and they were eventually deleted to free up space. So I know the system should work correctly.

I hope you can find your problem soon.

[james_k_p]

Welp, as I said in my last post, the late sunday night game did work without issues. I had moved some things around to make even more room. The noon game I may have had 40 gigs of free space, and the issue occured. For the night game, I got it up to 58 gigs, and the problem never occurred. So I guess that was it.

I did enable logging and I patiently await next Sunday .

[sic0048]

This is really just grasping at straws - but have you defragged your drive recently? If not, I would suggest it.

[james_k_p]

Nope, haven't defragged it.

I shall, as well as leaving 60 gigs free for my next attempt, but that won't be until next Sunday .

It did work with the sunday night game without issue, so I would imagine it will work next sunday with more space cleaned up. I just wish it would run until the space is out, not when I still have many gigs left. Crazzzzy.