Problems with recording from channel that has changed sources to firewire

[PhillJones]

I recently started recording over firewire again after not using it for a few months. Because I had issues in the past, I only had some of the channels record over firewire and planned to move them all over once I'd proved that I could get it to work.

Now I tried to move just one channel over from the s-video source to the firewire source. I tested it to make sure it wasn't 5c encrypted and even managed to watch it live in sage.

However, every time it tries to record, I get a corrupt mpeg that is too small, the screen is black and the decoder locks up. It's definitely not that the channel has suddenly become encrypted because I've tested it by recording using graphedit.

Could the fact that I've moved the channel from one source to another be causeing something to go wrong. Perhaps sage is confused about which source it's supposed to be using? Does some setting get set someplace when you select a channel in source setup and not always get deleted. when you remove the channel?

Any ideas greatly appreciated.

[PhillJones]

bump

Anybody any ideas.

I'm not sure if I should nuke my wiz.bin file or strip out both video sources and start from scratch.

I'm not sure if either will fix it or what other damage I might do if I try either of these things. I'm worried that it's to do with a conflict between the source that sage remembers me recording it from and where I'm telling it to record from now. If I remover the sources and reinstall them, I might mess up all my channels. If I remove wiz.bin, I've no idea how much damage I'll do.

[PhillJones]

Okay, one last bump and plea for help.

[olyar15]

One possibility is that you aren't giving the cable box enough time to tune into the channel before sage starts recording. There is a setting in the sgraphrecorder.ini file that you can change to delay the start of recording. Also, there is a setting in the sage.properties to set "alwaystune=false" or something like that (I'm not at home right now).

Try to manually record something on the channel in question, then see if the resulting file is growing properly. If it isn't, stop then restart the recording. Since Sage doesn't have to tune the channel again, it should be able to start recording right away.

[PhillJones]

Originally Posted by olyar15

One possibility is that you aren't giving the cable box enough time to tune into the channel before sage starts recording. There is a setting in the sgraphrecorder.ini file that you can change to delay the start of recording. Also, there is a setting in the sage.properties to set "alwaystune=false" or something like that (I'm not at home right now).

Try to manually record something on the channel in question, then see if the resulting file is growing properly. If it isn't, stop then restart the recording. Since Sage doesn't have to tune the channel again, it should be able to start recording right away.

Thanks, I'll check into that, maybe the SD channels need a longer delay, or I need a longer delay because I'm going from HD to SD.

[PhillJones]

Originally Posted by olyar15

One possibility is that you aren't giving the cable box enough time to tune into the channel before sage starts recording. There is a setting in the sgraphrecorder.ini file that you can change to delay the start of recording. Also, there is a setting in the sage.properties to set "alwaystune=false" or something like that (I'm not at home right now).

Try to manually record something on the channel in question, then see if the resulting file is growing properly. If it isn't, stop then restart the recording. Since Sage doesn't have to tune the channel again, it should be able to start recording right away.

It definately will record using graphedit and if the cable box is tuned to comedy channel before I try and watch live through sage, it works.

It goes wrong when I switch away and switch back. So something is going wrong when I tune the channel. If I change channel to comedy central, sage hangs irrecoverably ans need to be ctrl-alt-deleted. If I restart sage it works again so sgraphrecorder survives intact.

If I don't try and watch live but schedule a recording. sage seems to record it but then if I play the recording, sage crashes. Further, any recordings made after the comedy central recordings are also invalid and cause sage to crash uplon playback. I have to restart sage for valid recordings to be made.

Does this mean that the problem is with the network encoder?

It's not that I'm not giving it enough time because Iset the delay to 3 seconds as a test of that. It still froze. I also tried setting stop graph on switch and that didn't help either. I've put both settings back to their default values now.

[olyar15]

You may need to set the delay longer, depending on your cable box. I have mine set to 6 seconds. I had problems before where recordings weren't working properly. Either they ended up being 0 bytes and subsequently deleted by Sage, or when I tried to play them, Sage stopped responding and I had to kill the program via Task Manager. Now that I set the delay to 6 seconds, so far I haven't had any problems.

[PhillJones]

Okay, tommorrow, I'll set the delay to 20 seconds. Not that I'm seriously planning to use it at 20 seconds but if it's the problem, it'll definately work, then I can shorten the delay untill it stops working again and find the cutoff.

[olyar15]

Better yet, get VLC, use it to watch the firewire stream, then manually change channels on the cable box and see how long it takes to tune into various channels. Take the worst-case scenario and that will give you the time delay you need.

[PhillJones]

Okay, I did that. 4 1/2 seconds was the worst, so I set it 5 seconds. It's wierd that even with the delay set to 1265ms it sometimes works. It's also odd that sometimes, it doesn't seem to mind if you start the capture, before it's managed to tune. Maybe it's to do with where the previous channel was and changes in resolution or 5c. Even stranger is that 6 months ago I had firewire working and this was not an issue. Perhaps a software 'upgrade' by comcast has slowed tuning of the cable box.

Anyway, The Daily Show wasn't a new one last night, at least I assume it wasn't since it didn't try to record anything so I can't say for certain yet. I'll want to wait a week before I decide it's truely working so if it still doesn't work I'll post again otherwise, for the benefit of future pilgrims...

Symptom: Sage hangs irrecoverably when playing recordings captured from a particular channel. The channel isn't encrypted as verified by vlc player or by manually recording via graphedit. If the cable box is already tuned to that channel, it works fine, the problem is therefore associated with channel changing. The mpeg files in the recording directory cannot be played by another player, they are also too small. After a failed recording, sage must be restarted or all firewire recordings will be corrupt.

Problem: the delay between changing channel and starting recording is too short, the presence of either 5c encoded material at the begining of the recording or a change in resolution crashes the capture stream.

Solution: I used vlc player and a stop watch. I started the stop watch when I told sage to change channel and stopped it when I got a clear image through vlc. I tried it changing from and to a variety of channels. In my case, the longest time was 4 1/2 seconds so I set the delay to 5 seconds.

If I don't post again to this thread then the problem was fixed by this method.