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Cascading recording failures/live tv fail/recordings stuck in "active"


sle118

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sle118

I have been experiencing multiple issues over the past few months and I think they are all related to each other:

- Recordings don't fire, logs says that the timer fired but that it was too late

- Recordings are stuck at "Active Recordings"

- Recordings that don't leave a trace and just don't seem to be doing anything 

- Live TV not working (I get the spinning circle but no transcoding on the server is done and nothing streams)

 

This morning I looked at the status of multiple schedules I had done. All of them (8 in total) have failed. Despite having the option to automatically transcode, there is not even a trace of ffmpeg launching and the log file has very sparse on details for what could have gone wrong.  

 

I have 2 sources for streams: an old HDHomeRun and NextPVR (through m3u), so my first thought was that both were failing to return a proper stream.  So I connected to the same URL that emby uses for NextPVR and got an actual stream.

 

Next I tried getting the same stream from Emby by clicking on "Play" for that channel. I was greeted with an endless spinning circle and no stream at all. 

 

This is saddening...

 

@@Luke, sorry for tagging you again on this.  How can I send the logs so they don't show up in public?  I have a google drive link (anyone with link can open) but don't want to post it directly on the board since I don't want to post logs that show personal data.

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sle118

Additional note: 

 

Restarted Emby and Live TV Auto-magically works again

 

** EDIT: until next time recording fails again

Edited by sle118
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sle118

I think I might have identified another source of failure in my system. I am using is NextPVR as an m3u source, and during streaming it sends chunks of 50000 bytes.  

 

It seems like the buffering sometimes experiences retries (the buffer has insufficient data when the packet is scheduled to be sent out), and my most recent failure seem to have happened at a time where NextPVR was trying to buffer.

 

So I looked at my NextPVR Server (different machine) in hope to get some insights and found that the disk was spinning like crazy (100% usage, mostly swapping). This is not good, considering that NextPVR is building its buffer to disk before uploading it. 

 

Here is the link to the ffmpeg transcode file

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5I4AMklqDsqXzdBb3cwTjVsQU0/view?usp=sharing

 

With the memory/swapping resolved on the NextPVR box, I'll keep testing to see if it's more stable.  As an FYI, NextPVR did manage to resume sending packets, but at that point ffmpeg was already dead. I wonder if it would be possible to make it more tolerant to buffering issues/stream errors from buffering issues.

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sle118

@@Luke,  

 

I might have found the root cause of my problems!!!

 

- The signal of some channels from the HDHR is unstable, sometimes resulting in the HDHR not being able to lock on the signal

- Emby opens a UDP connection and no data is received

 

Any subsequent attempt to stream or record, from any source, will fail.  In my opinion, Emby LiveTV should not die on a bad stream. Hoping the logs below will be useful.

 

Here is the link to the log file (I have created a small script to obfuscate what I think has to be)

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B5I4AMklqDsqTExDQnNkMnA4ekk?usp=sharing

Edited by sle118
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sle118

What led you to that?

 

I realized that the failures always followed recording a certain channel. So I tried watching that channel on the HDHomerun app and no picture is returned. Choosing a different channel works just fine, though. I am running a test right now, with a known working channel, recording back-to-back 2 shows with a m3u in parallel and so far so good.

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