No recordings being scheduled because tuners were not functioning

[DarkWolf77]

SageTV has been working find for a while now, but suddenly I'm having an issue where nothing is being scheduled to record. I first noticed this over the weekend, but figured that nothing much was airing. I went to check this morning, but I found that the entire recording schedule is blank! I checked the EPG and it's populating normally by what I can tell on my phone screen, but then when I go back to the schedule, it's definitely blank. I have three functioning, active tuners, so not sure what the issue might be. I even tried to manually mark something to record via the web interface and.... nothing. Nothing is on the schedule whatsoever. So I happen to pop over to the video sources and the HDHR tuners are all look ok, until I go into the deeper settings and see that it's saying "not functioning" for the tuners. Turns out OpenDCT wasn't running for some reason and that caused the issue...

Anyway, TLDR; Shouldn't SageTV have sent out a system message saying something about tuners not functioning?

Anyone have any tips for checking to see if OpenDCT is running, or automatically restarting it if it goes down?

[waynedunham]

Just curious, did this happen after a reboot? My Win8 machine couldn't tune whenever I'd do a reboot. I finally tracked it down to SageDCT (older than openDCT, but still did the tuning).
For whatever reason there was a timing issue and on a reboot SageDCT was running, but SageTV somehow either didn't know about it, or couldn't communicate with it.
I would go into the control program for SageDCT and simply stop and restart the service and it would then tune just fine.

I finally resolved the issue by going into Windows services and setting SageDCT to delayed start. Never had an issue like that again on reboots.

I would see error messages in the system messages for all the failed recordings though. Since you are using OpenDCT you may want to post in that topic. They are a very helpful bunch and can probably find out why it wasn't running.

[DarkWolf77]

Originally Posted by waynedunham

Just curious, did this happen after a reboot? My Win8 machine couldn't tune whenever I'd do a reboot. I finally tracked it down to SageDCT (older than openDCT, but still did the tuning).
For whatever reason there was a timing issue and on a reboot SageDCT was running, but SageTV somehow either didn't know about it, or couldn't communicate with it.
I would go into the control program for SageDCT and simply stop and restart the service and it would then tune just fine.

I finally resolved the issue by going into Windows services and setting SageDCT to delayed start. Never had an issue like that again on reboots.

I would see error messages in the system messages for all the failed recordings though. Since you are using OpenDCT you may want to post in that topic. They are a very helpful bunch and can probably find out why it wasn't running.

I'm pretty sure it hadn't rebooted, which is the funny part. Just found that the service wasn't running - so when I started that, Sage picked it up just fine and scheduled a bunch of recordings almost immediately.

You bring up a good point about OpenDCT, just figured it would be nice if sage kicked up a message if a tuner was set to not functioning - it would have saved me some time for sure. Hopefully the logs haven't been overwritten since it was shut down...

[Tiki]

I've seen this problem occasionally with SageDCT too. In my case it worked flawlessly for probably a year, then out of the blue it started having issues where it wouldn't start properly after a reboot (some sort of timing issue I guess where The Sage service started before SageDCT was ready?). This would happen randomly, but frequently (maybe 30% of the time). It went on like this for a couple months and then no more problems for another year or so. I never figured out what caused the timing issue or what resolved it (maybe a Windows update or some other software update?).

Still I am now in the habit whenever I restart Sage the first thing I do is go to the info screen and check status on all tuners to make sure all are listed as functioning.

I also had a similar problem with a completely different cause. I had the SageDCT service quit without warning and take the tuners offline. That turned out to be caused by running out of space on my boot disk. Replacing with a larger drive stopped that.

[DarkWolf77]

Originally Posted by Tiki

Still I am now in the habit whenever I restart Sage the first thing I do is go to the info screen and check status on all tuners to make sure all are listed as functioning.

Hm... You know, I'm wondering if there's a way to have SJQ check to see if the tuners are marked functioning and if they're not, trigger a restart of the service... Unfortunately, something like that would be beyond my skillset, I'd have to poke around and see if it's even possible.