Lots of failed/incorrect recordings... Wish there was a better way to "scan" them.

[stuckless]

Of course this stuff always happens when I travel, and never(rarely), when I'm actually at home

I spent the last 3 weeks in Australia/New Zealand for work, and got back last night, decided to watch a show, and the first show I hit was just a 1 hour recording of my satellite error screen telling me that the channel was invalid. On Bell, if you hit a channel that you don't have access to, it shows an error, and you have to hit up/down to get out of it. Entering a new channel, doesn't work. So, I have 3 weeks of recordings that are all just this error screen (this also tells me that SageTV doesn't really balance its tuners --
I have 2 tuners, but, sagetv rarely needs both. The second tuner was fine.)

Thankfully in BMT, I can go to the "Unwatched TV" view, and then go into to each show, an pull up the video thumbnails and easily tell which shows are good/bad (most were bad), and then delete the those episodes.

I encountered this a couple years ago, and I recall thinking, at that time, what if after a recording I could 'scan' the thumbnails (or a couple of random thumbnails) and somehow tell if I had a "bad recording". I never did do this, because it happens so infrequently, but it would be cool, if there was a way to 'validate' a recording. Maybe randomly pick 5-10 frames and then compare how similar they are (there must be an image library that can do this).

I had bad week before I left for travels, in that I had a bunch of recordings that all had a/v sync issues. I hadn't experienced that in a long time, but, in a span of a few days, everything recorded with a gradual drift, so that as you progressed, things got more and more out of sync. I thought it may have been the Android MiniClient, so I tried these in Plex as well, and plex also had the same a/v sync issues.

Not a good month for SageTV

[wnjj]

Could you use Compskip to recognize bad recordings? It spits out various things that may be useful.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by wnjj

Could you use Compskip to recognize bad recordings? It spits out various things that may be useful.

It would be interesting to explore that. I just don't know enough about comskip to understand what it spits out. You could, I guess, look the edl file and if there are few commercials 1 or less, then trigger an error.

[wnjj]

Originally Posted by stuckless

It would be interesting to explore that. I just don't know enough about comskip to understand what it spits out. You could, I guess, look the edl file and if there are few commercials 1 or less, then trigger an error.

There is a verbose mode that outputs all kinds of video frame information. Also, one of the detection options is “silence” so it can also see where the audio stream drops. Run it on one of your failed recordings and see what it produces that is different than a “normal” show. Maybe no audio at all is enough?

[MattHelm]

I thought someone made an app like this (maybe 2 or so years ago???) for cable box errors. It would be the same kind of thing.