Jump to content

Multiple Hauppauge Turners - Some recordings fail to start


PenkethBoy

Recommended Posts

PenkethBoy

I have added two new WinTv Dual turners to my existing WinTv Dual (uk) - to give 6 recording channels

 

Everything was working fine with one WinTV-dual

 

After setting up the tuners in WinTV 8.5 refreshing the guide etc

 

I added then to Emby - so it has three WinTv-Duals listed on the LiveTV page and Schedules Direct is setup as the guide source

 

5a9d98921cda4_Capture3.jpg

 

I setup some recordings that would occur at the approx same time to see if the tuners would be used - see below

 

5a9d98cbeae27_Capture.jpg

 

As you can see it appears four recording are occurring - but ONLY the top two actually are

 

The bottom two (even after refreshing the page several times) are not actually recording - not created anything on disc

 

Also the Warehouse 13 recording finished at 19:00 and does not disappear again after a refresh

 

Checking the tuners - i can see one with both record channels illuminated and one on another - the third tuner has no lights - in theory 3 tuner channels in use - but only two actually recording - the third might be hung up with Warehouse 13 although the file was saved correctly

 

WinTv shows three of six channels in use

5a9d9a9cc8283_Capture.png

 

Its now gone past 19:30 and the Schedule screen now looks like this

 

5a9d9bd320a3e_Capture4.jpg

 

Still nothing saved to disk for MASH or CSI Miami

 

This is on Stable 3.3.1.0

 

Any thoughts?

Edited by PenkethBoy
Link to comment
Share on other sites

PenkethBoy

Thought i would try again this morning

 

restarting emby cleared the locked tuner channels

 

I rebooted the server(pc) and now i can get more than 2 streams to record - actually have 5 manual recordings running at the moment and they appear to be recording fine

 

Will setup some scheduled recordings in a bit

 

Think it must have been the wintv software/drivers were not working properly even though no errors were shown  - i had not rebooted after adding the new tuners which may have been needed

 

Will keep an eye on this to see if its now resolved

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

PenkethBoy

Hi

 

I found what was causing the problem - and am still testing options - to be 100% sure :)

 

In the UK Freeview (over the air TV) is going through some changes (moving channels to other frequencies) and although a channel is found by the tuner - it does not mean that the channel actually works!

 

So what appears to happen is Emby gets locked/hung up on one of these "Ghost" channels as it receives no data - so the record fails - but Emby does not "give up" so the tuner never gets released/record never ends  - only a restart of Emby releases the tuner. If you pick one of these "Ghost" channels then it stuffs up all the recording - in the example screenshots it was "Dogfights on More4 +1" causing the issue - Hunger Games recorded fine (as it started before Dogfights) CSI Miami and Mash never recorded - both on Non Ghost channels.

 

I figured this out by moving to NextPVR - it was a bit more tolerant of the Ghost channels - It would create a Zero byte file - record for an hour - and release the tuner - Which is how i figured out what was going on - as some channels worked and some did not - thought it was one of the tuners for awhile - but tested all three separately and they were fine recording on both channels.

 

Also if you try LiveTV and it fails to work (possibly a Ghost channel) this locks up all the tuners as well until you restart Emby - this occurs with HDHomerun as well which i have being used by my QNAP - again needs a reboot of Emby to release the tuners.

 

Any chance you could add a fix to release the tuners after the "recording" period has expired (might cause other issues) or a way in Emby to force a release by the admin user?

 

So i have removed all the Ghost channels (i know of) from my setup yesterday and will monitor for a few days to see if i have this correct

 

If all goes well i may well move back to native support - although having Multiplex support in NextPVR is tempting - but Emby native support is much snappier

 

If you need any more info/logs(dont show any errors) or for me to test something let me know :)

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...
Troy Heinrich

I have a similar issue going on.  I have a Hauppage PCIe WinTV Quad tuner card in a Windows 10 Pro (intel i5 Dell with 8GB RAM).  It was working great until I started adding a lot of simultaneous recordings.  Now....every night I have missed recordings, because certain programs never "stop" recording....  The tuners are not being "shutdown" properly and Emby continues to show the recordings as "active".  Hauppage support sent me a batch file that allows me to see all four active tuners.  I can see that the tuners are not being "shudown", therefore, I'm assuming Emby won't record anymore programs since it thinks that the recordings are still active.  I see that Emby uses the WIndows task Scheduler to "kick" off the recordings, but how is the process of stopping the tuners handled?

 

Update:

 

I may have an idea of what is going on here:  I have a Quad tuner card and it appears as though this "hung tuner" situation may only be happening when I have more "scheduled" recordings for a particular time-slot than tuners available.  For instance, I have noticed this to be a problem every evening around 10:00pm. I looked through the scheduled programs and it looks like this is the only time-slot that I have 5 recordings scheduled but I only have a single Quad tuner card in the computer.  So....I will update this as I go along.  I am going to babysit the server today and see if all recordings are successful up until the 10:00pm time-slot. Provided that is all OK (and I suspect it will be), I will  make sure that it still happens tonight (I suspect it will).  I will then restart the Hauppage TV Tuner Service and Emby.  Change the recordings for 10:00pm the following evening to make sure that I only have 4 recordings for any given time-slot.  I will then reboot the computer just to make sure that all is ready for the next day's recordings....

 

Stay tuned.....

Edited by Troy Heinrich
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have a similar issue going on.  I have a Hauppage PCIe WinTV Quad tuner card in a Windows 10 Pro (intel i5 Dell with 8GB RAM).  It was working great until I started adding a lot of simultaneous recordings.  Now....every night I have missed recordings, because certain programs never "stop" recording....  The tuners are not being "shutdown" properly and Emby continues to show the recordings as "active".  Hauppage support sent me a batch file that allows me to see all four active tuners.  I can see that the tuners are not being "shudown", therefore, I'm assuming Emby won't record anymore programs since it thinks that the recordings are still active.  I see that Emby uses the WIndows task Scheduler to "kick" off the recordings, but how is the process of stopping the tuners handled?

 

Update:

 

I may have an idea of what is going on here:  I have a Quad tuner card and it appears as though this "hung tuner" situation may only be happening when I have more "scheduled" recordings for a particular time-slot than tuners available.  For instance, I have noticed this to be a problem every evening around 10:00pm. I looked through the scheduled programs and it looks like this is the only time-slot that I have 5 recordings scheduled but I only have a single Quad tuner card in the computer.  So....I will update this as I go along.  I am going to babysit the server today and see if all recordings are successful up until the 10:00pm time-slot. Provided that is all OK (and I suspect it will be), I will  make sure that it still happens tonight (I suspect it will).  I will then restart the Hauppage TV Tuner Service and Emby.  Change the recordings for 10:00pm the following evening to make sure that I only have 4 recordings for any given time-slot.  I will then reboot the computer just to make sure that all is ready for the next day's recordings....

 

Stay tuned.....

 

You might be on to something. It's possible we're handling this as well as we should with hauppauge. We'll look into this, thanks.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

PenkethBoy

As an update from my side the hung tuners are a regular occurrence but not due to having more recordings than tuners - but it does appear to be related to multiple recordings at the same time - in that its more likely to have a tuner or two stuck after multiple recordings.

 

This has another side effect in that the pause buffer c:\user\public\public videos\pause buffer\ fills up with files which are not cleared until either emby is rebooted or you run up wintv and it does some housekeeping. The pause buffer does not fill up when you do not have hung tuners.

 

Also i get a lot of "orphaned" ffmpeg processes sitting idle using ~2.5meg of ram - this is due to using the conversion option still in Stable - not a big problem as a reboot of stable fixes it - hopefully the new DVR option which is not in beta yet will solve this.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Troy Heinrich

So....as expected, I had the same issue last night.  I had 5 programs set to record.  Three of which were to record from 10:00pm to 10:30pm and one from 10:00pm to 11:00pm.  None of them finished recording.  I had to manually tell Emby to "stop" the recording.  Emby removed them from the list of "active" recordings, but the tuners still stayed active.  I then shutdown Emby Server and within 60 seconds or so of doing that, all Tuners "freed up".  I did not have to restart Hauppage TV Server service.  I did not check to see if the recordings actually happened.  All recordings have been successful since.

 

I checked the schedule tonight and I have 4 recordings set for the 10:00pm to 11:00pm time-slot.

 

Stay tuned.... no pun intended :)

Edited by Troy Heinrich
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Troy Heinrich

PenkethBoy: It appears as though you are right.  Yesterday I ran all day long recording one or two programs almost every hour until 9:00PM CST at which time I had 4 programs to record from 9-10ppm.  I also had 4 set to record from 10-11pm.  I never got to the 10-11pm recordings, because several of the 9-10pm recordings never finished.  I would love to stick with Emby, but having problems with hung tuner(s) on a nightly basis just isn't going to cut it.  I would love to run this on Linux,but when I installed it on UBUNTU, even though the tuners were working (lspci -vnn), Emby didn't appear to have support for Hauppage cards.

 

Luke, any possible way to get Emby to work with Linux using the Hauppage QuadHD card?

 

As my final test, tonight I will make sure that there aren't more than 3 programs recording at one time.  It might tell us something....

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Diedrich

In the UK Freeview (over the air TV) is going through some changes (moving channels to other frequencies) and although a channel is found by the tuner - it does not mean that the channel actually works!

tldr; I have a feeling this is going to be a very common complaint on this message board and that there should be some formal Emby email sent out to its users notifying them of the upcoming changes and that they will need to have their tuner backend rescan channels.

——-

I recently got an email from my PBS station here in Lansing, MI saying that they will be switching to a new frequency on May 1. They mentioned that they, along with the other stations in the area, will soon be complying with the FCC reassignment of broadcast spectrum changes due by 2020. They said that users would need to have their converter box rescan the channels - this is only to pick up the new frequency, this does not mean the channel will change.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

PenkethBoy

@@Luke

 

Currently from last night I have a hung tuner - which is slowly filling up my c:\users\public\public videos\pause buffer with 100MB files since 02:57 last night

 

In the image below you can see one of the "Capture plugin for usb devices..." is at 0.5% which means one of its two tuners is in use - i have no recording scheduled for the next few hours and no current recording is taking place other than the hung tuner.

Also you can see that i have an orphaned ffmpeg process sitting there at 2.6MB which will stay like that till the Emby server is rebooted - as will the tuner

Note: I have two embyservers showing as i have Stable and Beta running on the machine.

This situation exists on the Stable server.

 

5ad86d7fe2e8b_Capture.jpg

 

logs attached from yesterday and today so covering a period of several (~20) recordings

 

server-63659648079.txtserver-63659692799.txt

 

The above situation is common and happens almost every day - sometimes i have 2-4 hung tuners some days just one - a reboot of the server clears the issues so it is Emby related.

 

For reference i have approx 15-20 recording scheduled per day.

 

Need anymore info let me know.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Troy Heinrich

Not quite the same issue as PenkethBoy.  I do have hung tuners.  All 4 tuners were hung this morning.  Started having trouble after 9:00pm CST.  It's the same everyday.  I wake up and have to reset the Emby Server.  Worked fine all day until 9:00pm and after.
 

Luke/PenkethBoy:  Well....I was a little to hasty when I initially posted this message.  I am seeing the pause buffer fill up as well.  I have not seen the ffmpeg.exe running....but I didn't look for it at the exact time it happened.

 

PenkethBoy: Do you have any "post" processing scripts/batch files?  I do....I have a batch file that merely runs and places the name of the file into a "transcode" directory.  I then have a scheduled task batch file that runs every two hours that reads this directory, finds the location of the real .TS file and then transcodes the file from TS MP2 into MP4.  I have disabled that in Emby today to see if that may be the issue.  While I know that my BATCH file is not "hanging" or endless looping, etc... My thought is that it's possible that the post processing process of Emby is the real issue.  That's why I am curious to know if you have any post processing script.  If so, maybe we should both disable it for now and see if that clears up the issue.  I have another batch file that I can run that merely scans the entire library searching for .TS files and converts them to Amazon Firetv 1080P MP4 using handbrakecli.

 

 

 

Luke: Log is included.  I have also attached the screenshot.

Emby-Server-Log.txt

DOS Tasklist.txt

post-304683-0-11246400-1524140374_thumb.jpg

Edited by Troy Heinrich
Link to comment
Share on other sites

PenkethBoy

No post processing - doubt thats the issue

 

i do have transcode to MKV enabled - thats whats causing the ffmpeg processes

 

the hung tuners is something to do with how emby closes the connection to the hauppauge tv server - and with no error correction this is where we are

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Troy Heinrich

I agree.  It's probably not the issue.  One would hope that the Emby server process would have already "closed" the connection with the tuner before calling the post processing script.  Just trying to make sure that I have exhausted all possibilities on my end to give Luke as much feedback as possible.  Hopefully, Luke is looking into the problem.  Haven't heard back from him since uploading my log file this morning.  I've looked at the log file and there are some errors in it, but doesn't appear to be errors that should cause a hung tuner.

 

I have a few errors regarding slow connection times to assets.fanart.tv to download the tvthumbnails that cause the HTTP Server to freak out, but no other errors until I get this error:

 

2018-04-18 21:55:43.235 Error App: Error scheduling wake timer
    *** Error Report ***
    Version: 3.3.1.19
    Command line: C:\Users\Video\AppData\Roaming\Emby-Server\system\EmbyServer.dll
    Operating system: Microsoft Windows NT 6.2.9200.0
    64-Bit OS: True
    64-Bit Process: True
    User Interactive: True
    Processor count: 4
    Program data path: C:\Users\Video\AppData\Roaming\Emby-Server\programdata
    Application directory: C:\Users\Video\AppData\Roaming\Emby-Server\system
    System.UnauthorizedAccessException: Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED))

 

which I believe is coming only because I don't currently have a free tuner available.  After that, no other recordings work.  Just keep getting the same error message "Access is denied"

Link to comment
Share on other sites

PenkethBoy

Well i'm on the Stable server for this

 

the wake timer came in a few beta's ago

 

Yes Luke has not even downloaded the logs he was asking for - hmmm

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Troy Heinrich

Luke:  Don't bother.... I'm sticking with Plex.  At least the programmers over there took me seriously.  I debugged a problem with their Web APP and they took me seriously and are working to find the answer.  It's too bad.  I was a C programmer for 8 years with Honeywell back in the early 90's and I am now the Vice President of a fiber optic internet company that I started with family in the late 90's.  So I have been in the IT field for over 25 years and I know how to take a systematic approach to solving a programming error.  Not only do I know how to program, but I actually have a really good programmer on staff.  We're a small company, but I could have brought Emby a pretty decent following and possibly other resources.  Our residential customer base looks to our company for advice on technology and your product on the outset looked as though it could be promising.  At this time, I will not be recommending it.  I have a pretty large capital budget that I could have used to install servers on for testing in a Data Center that is directly connected via fiber optic to the Chicago Equinix Exchange(One of if not the largest Internet Data Centers in the world) to give you real world servers to test on.

 

But, Any PVR company that does not recognize:

 

1)  You cannot miss a recording.  No matter what... This is a death nail in a PVR coffin.  If that doesn't cause your company to stand up and take notice and re-prioritize efforts, then sadly I question the long term viability of your product.  It would have been better for you guys NOT to have released support for Hauppage in the first place than to do it and fail.  I have yet to have even 1 successful day of recording without having to restart the Emby server.  You must admit, that's not a successful track record.  Furthermore, this page (which is a direct link off of the Emby page) https://github.com/MediaBrowser/Wiki/wiki/Live%20TVsays you have support for Hauppage.  When in fact you don't.

 

2) You can't leave your customers wondering if you have looked into the problem.

 

3) That Hauppage has been in the OTA game for decades and is one of the largest providers of OTA cards and yet your product doesn't work with it consistently?  It's no wonder that Emby is not listed on their site like Plex is.

 

 

Good luck to you and your team.

Edited by Troy Heinrich
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi, we do support Hauppauge, just on Windows only at this point. I think there are some improvements we need to make in regards to hauppauge tuner management to detect conflicts and not allow the tuner to get stuck in this situation. We will look into it, thanks.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

PenkethBoy

Well hopefully we can have a fix in the near future as its happening most days for me

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...
Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...