recordings start delayed by ~5 minutes?

[Zarniwoop]

Hi there!

I've got the problem that sagetv is always recording exactly 55 minutes instead of 60 minutes of shows that are 1 hour long.

Does anybody encounter the same problem and have a solution for this?

Edit: It happens when I record things in a row on the same channel

Cheers,
Zarniwoop

[carlgar]

Is is possible you had 5 minutes of padding for the previous program? Sage TV does not show the padding in the program length when playing a program but the data is there.

[Zarniwoop]

Hmm.. I don't think that I have a padding.
At least I didn't configure any padding.

I tried to record 3 things in a row. The first one just starts fine but the others all start 5 minutes later.
Is it possible that sage forces a 5 minute break before recording the next one? They were all recorded by the same sage source. I've got 3 cards in the box.

[carlgar]

If you did a manual recording then no padding would be present unless you used the modify start or end times. Have you tried recording on all 3 cards at the same time? If so, do they all show this problem or just one of them? Is the missing 5 mins at the start or the end of the show. Is you system clock accurate at the start and completion of the recordings?

[roobelle]

I was a happy user of SageTV for almost 2 years untiil I decided to upgrade to version 2.1.

The software creates a file at the time it is supposed to start recording, but writes nothing to this file (the file size remains 0 according to XP). After 5 minutes, the software creates another file and actually starts to record to this one. The end result is that the first 5 minutes of every program is missing.

SageTV is aware that this part of the file is missing because I see a red bar for this part of the program when I play it back.

If the problem is happening, it seems to happen for every program recorded during the time SageTV is running. However, this problem does not occur every time I run the software, but occurs frequently enough that I have been unable to figure out how to reliably create the program so that it can be diagnosed.

I installed the 2.2 beta hoping the problem would be gone, but it still exists (I just submitted a bug report for the 2.2 beta).

Any ideas (other than reverting back to 1.4 or 2.0, if I can find the cd they are on)?

[aberson]

Can anyone help me solve this one? I haven't found it in my searches

Most of my recordings seem to start 5 minutes late. The first 5 minutes of the show have red instead of green in the timebar. The only reason I can think for this is that after installing Sage, I realized my system clock was off by about 5 minutes and I changed it.

Is there something about syncing the clock with Sage's server or sage having it's own internal clock that could cause this?

Thanks for any suggestions
Adam

[aberson]

ok - even weirder.

I was just watching live tv, but I was watching about 10 minutes behind realtime. When the the first show I was watching finished, the display stuttered for a little bit, and then started playing the next live show from that channel - but it started 5 minutes into the show! With the first 5 minutes of the timebar red! Even though I was watching LIVE TV continuously! What gives???

I'd really appreciate any help - this is just weird.

[korben_dallas]

You haven't by chance been messing with your .properties file, have you?

Also, do you know if your Sage is set to synchronize the system clock w/ epg?

[aberson]

well, I did to install some STV's, but I didn't change any other settings.

Are there any settings in the properties that would affect that?

After you posted that, I searced through the properties file for anything with "300" or "300000" in it - those could be delays in seconds or milliseconds that would account for the 5 minutes, and I also searched for "delay", "offset", and "time". Here are the interesting ones that I found:

seeker/channel_change_ask_advance=300000
videoframe/time_to_start_into_tv_file_playback=3000

That second one seems like it could be the culprit, but it's at 3000, which I assume means 3 SECONDS. Plus, that's only for playback - it should still be recording the first part, but on mine it shows up red.


It is setup to sync with the server's clock - I was thinking that could be the culprit since I manually changed the system clock after first installing sage and running it for a little bit. Maybe I should disable the sync, force an update, and then re-enable it.

Adam

[bhageman]

I had a similar problem. I recently had a conflict with two shows back to back, one ending at 9pm, the other starting at 9am. I checked favorites padding, padding in the detailed setup, and recording options (all padding was turned off).

I opened my properties file, scanned thru, and found a line (can't remember it specifically, I'm at work), but it was set to extend the recording end time by 30000. I set it back to "0" and the conflict went away. As far as I could find, this property didn't show up anywhere in the UI.

I had set-up padding months ago, but turned it off because it caused all kinds of schedule conflicts for me. This one last setting must have been buried somewhere in the UI and I missed resetting it.

If you've every played around with padding, you may want to scan thru your properties file looking for anything like this. Search for "30000", I believe that is five minutes in milliseconds, right?

[Edit] Just saw your post. Looks like you took my suggestion before I suggested it.

[aberson]

Just found 3 other threads talking about this topic - one might have the solution

Recording quality - the post says "SVCD Standard" could be the culprit - that's what I was using, gonna try "SVCD Long Play". While I'm at it, I'm also going to disable sync to sage's servers, and instead try a freeware sync to a NIST server.

here's the message I posted to the other threads, just so everybody is on the same page.

-------------

Hi
A few weeks ago I didn't see any other threads about it, so I started a thread talking about a problem where recordings start 5 minutes delayed

tonight I did a search for "5 minutes" and I found three others:
SageTV not recording the first 5 minutes

Missing first five minutes - says it might be a result of recording quality settings

Recording 55 minutes instead of 60 minutes - talking about 3 recordings in a row, could be related to padding


I figured I'd post this message to all 4 threads to see if anybody has any solutions - if you do, please post them to all these threads! (or at least to mine!

Adam

[Opus4]

I merged some of the threads into this one. Has anyone asked Tech Support about this?

- Andy

[aberson]

Well, killing Sync Time to Server and changing recording quality from SVCD Standard to SVCD Long didn't do it...

So I tried to hunt for a pattern - I sorted my recordings list by newest first, and turned off grouping, and I looked for any shows that were consecutive... and sure enough: any show that immediately follows another show has the first 5 minutes missing [well, in one case it was only the first 1:06], just like Zarniwoop saw above. Seems to be pretty consistent, and it seems to be shows that didn't have something before them are fine. I have to do some more looking though, because I deleted some shows before I decided to hunt for a pattern.

I don't have any padding turned on, and I do have the option to disable padding for back-to-back favorites on same channel, though this seems to apply between channels too. If we could alter stop padding in seconds instead of minutes, we could try adjusting the stop padding to negative 10 seconds...

Possible causes:
Could it relate to sage not being able to close the file when it's done recording, and thus refuses to open up a new one right away? Roobelle previously mentioned that sage does create the a -0 file and it just stays 0 bytes.

Could it relate to sage not being able to tune the tuner quick enough? [Possibly related to the issue where you need to 'close file' before tuning from one live-tv channel to another]

Bhageman thinks it's a property in the .properties file... Anything that is 300 or 300000 I've changed to another number, and the only other thing is:

power_management_wait_time=30000 [which looks like 30 seconds to me anyway]

here are some other ones that maybe could have an effect:

mmc/encoders/XXX/never_stop_encoding - mine is set to false - will cause SageTV to never stop recording on that capture device, helps fix problems with the PVR350 TV output crashing

videoframe/local_encoding_to_playback_delay - mine is set to 2000
- the amount of time SageTV should wait after starting recording of a file to start playing it back if the capture device is not a network encoder

FWIW: I'm using a pvr350 and Cayars17 STV on win2k

Adam

[aberson]

ok, I may have figured out a little more.

I setup a recording (ShowB) for 2pm. I was watching live TV (ShowA), and a few minutes before ShowB it asked if it could change the channel. I ignored the change channel window. At 2pm it, my live viewing of ShowA just froze on the screen - I'm not sure if this is appropriate behaviour or not.

While it was frozen, I took a look at my recordings directory:

ShowB opened a file (ShowB-0), but it stayed at 0 bytes. ShowA's file (ShowA-5) stopped growing in size also, however when sorted by last modified date, ShowA-5 was more recently modified than ShowB-0. [I guess they could have had the exact same time-stamp of 2pm, but I assume the next level of sorting would have been alpahbetical, and ShowA should have come up second alphabetically]

Then, with ShowA-5 still up on my screen (and frozen), I hit 'Close File', which took me back to the main menu. But, as soon as I hit 'Close File', ShowB-1 appeared and started growing in size and ShowB-0 disappeared. I was able to hit "View TV" and watch ShowB.

So, in summary it APPEARS that Sage is creating ShowB-0 while ShowA-5 is still open, and for some reason it doesn't really start recording ShowB until the ShowA file is "closed." This needs some further investigation, but why it takes exactly 5 minutes is still a mystery to me (unless there's some hardcoded timeout?) It also seems eerily similar to the problem of changing channels while watching LiveTV.

Next step is to try the same thing, but when transitioninig between 2 scheduled recordings instead of from live to scheduled. That's coming up in a few minutes

Adam

[aberson]

I retried what I did above, but with 2 consecutive recordings (instead of livetv->schedule). Call em ShowB and ShowC - both on the same channel, and I WAS able to reproduce it. ShowC opened a 0 byte file (ShowC-0), and it didn't record a thing until I manually started watching ShowB and then hit "close file" on ShowB - at that point, ShowC-1 opened and I was able to watch ShowC.

I thought commercial skip could be the issue, so I disabled that.

Then I tried ShowC to ShowD - this time on different channels. This time, after ShowD started with a 0 byte file, I tried playing ShowC and closing the file - but nothing happened! Then I tried playing ShowD (which was just a paused screen) and hitting "close file" and nothing happened! Then I tried ShowC again, and nothing happened. Then I tried going back to ShowD (still a paused screen), I hit the "options" menu to try to close the file - and as soon as I hit the options menu, ShowD-1 was created and started recording. BUT - the options menu that came up was NOT the options menu I'm used to seeing with the Cayars17 STV (which has 10 options) - this one only had about 4. Plus I never hit "close file".

I was still stuck in a paused screen of ShowD-0, so I exited to the menu, and then tried to watch ShowD and it played, with the first 2:12 not recorded... [2:12 coincidentally a multiple of the 1:06 I saw earlier]

Given that I saw this "weird" options menu instead of the Cayars one, I'm going to try going back to the default STV and seeing if that helps anything.

[aberson]

ok, doesn't seem to be the STV, but it happened a third way this time with the original STV.


The ShowE-0 file was created, 0 bytes. As soon as I started PLAYING the recording of ShowD, ShowE-1 was created and it started growing, this time the first 36 seconds missing.

So, now in my 4 attempts, I've had to do one of the following to get a 2nd consecutive show to start recording:
- Begin playing the previous show and "close file"
- Attempt to play the current show (which is a paused screen) and open the options menu (which came up with half the options as usual)
- Begin playing the previous show

Maybe it doesn't have to do with closing the file at all, but somehow forcing sage to just wake up or reset itself... Really not sure what to try next, maybe something in the properties file...

adam

[aberson]

OK - We may have a solution!

properties file:
seeker/fast_mux_switch (mine was set to true)

from another thread:

If you set enable_fast_mux=false, then it will reset the MPEG2 encoder every time it changes channels. However, it then needs to rebuffer the content on channel changes since it resets everything, which is why you get that little stutter sometimes if you have this option disabled.

Well, I tried setting mine to false, and it looks like it solves the 5 minute problem as well as the problem where you have to hit stop before changing channels on live tv... more testing needs to be done, but results look promising.

This may also relate to this option:
mmc/encoders/XXX/never_stop_encoding - will cause SageTV to never stop recording on that capture device, helps fix problems with the PVR350 TV output crashing

I tried it with the never_stop_encoding option set both ways, and it seems to work either way... [though I have had one crash so far, but none since then].

Adam

[nerys]

THis is the EXACT problem I am having I made the true/false change will see what happens !!!

Chris Taylor
http://www.zodiacreview.com/

[falchulk]

Originally Posted by aberson

OK - We may have a solution!

properties file:
seeker/fast_mux_switch (mine was set to true)

from another thread:


Well, I tried setting mine to false, and it looks like it solves the 5 minute problem as well as the problem where you have to hit stop before changing channels on live tv... more testing needs to be done, but results look promising.

This may also relate to this option:
mmc/encoders/XXX/never_stop_encoding - will cause SageTV to never stop recording on that capture device, helps fix problems with the PVR350 TV output crashing

I tried it with the never_stop_encoding option set both ways, and it seems to work either way... [though I have had one crash so far, but none since then].

Adam

I am not sure wy this would be the cause of the problem. Setting it to true will not reset the encoder but will cause an audio pop when changing channels. Resetting the encoder should not result in missing any time whatsoever It happens in so fast all you see is a stutter when changing channels, even on live tv.

[nerys]

well I happened to WATCH it happen once. not supposed to in mpeg1 so I tend to disable any live views but it was driving me nuts so I tried anyway

when the end of the hours came and it was time to stop program one and start program 2 I would get a frozen BLACK screen

now if I am WATCHING it for some reason it tends to reset in almost exactly minute in sleep mode its 5 minutes. the file is 0kb

I think "something" went wrong in the reinit and it "realized" this hence the zero kb file sage it seems is saying hey I got nothing so I am recording nothing and then something happens and it resets 1 minute or 5 minutes later and all is wep and it records normally

so far I am 2 for 2 with it set as false no buffer or padding and it properlu records the program.

I have 5 more programs setup to record in a row just to test this (friday nights important so I have to make sure it works or if I need to switch back to the hauppage recorder for friday night. so far so good though

I really am curious exactly WHAT that setting is and why it has this effect CLEARLY its not all sage otherwise everyone would experience and cleary everyone does not since its a VERY aggravating problem :-)

also padding -1minute also fixes it (most of the time 1 in 10 it still does it) but that is also annoying since you can miss the end of a program or next weeks preview :-)

Chris Taylor
http://www.zodiacreview.com/