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Live TV Pause Buffer fills HD and crashes server


dr_faulkner

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dr_faulkner

Added in a hauppage tv tuner card - works great, except it continually fills up the pause buffer - even when no device is pausing tv! 

 

There is apparently no size limit on the pause buffer - so it eventually trashes my server once  it has used all available HD space

 

Really need to fix this if Emby is going to be a viable solution for me

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PenkethBoy

Hi and Welcome

 

I have seen this (although not filling my drive completely) - for me a quick restart of Emby clears the pause buffer used by WinTv as this releases the tuner(s)

 

The pause buffer is used for any recording irrespective of the channel being paused/recorded - so the name is a bit misleading in that sense

 

There is more work needed by Emby to catch failed recordings/locked tuners - which i suspect leads to the pause buffer directory filling up as the tuner(s) are not released and continue to increase the buffer files(s) indefinitely

 

You can move the pause buffer to another drive with more space via the settings dialog in WinTV

 

as far as i can tell its partly a Emby problem and a WinTv problem in that they do not manage the pause buffer directory at all

 

I have 3 Hauppauge tuners and only see this occasionally but might depend on the quality of you TV signal - i am fortunate as i do not live very far from my transmitter.

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Hi, yes this is the way it currently works, but you are right, we need to allow you to set a size limit for it.

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dr_faulkner

 -  or a live tv pause time limit, or disable it altogether

 

What triggers it anyway? I do not even have pause pressed on live tv! It seems to have a mind of its own

 

It is filling up my C drive every day! (and hangs Emby every day as a consequence)

 

Is there some way to temporarily - or better yet, permanently disable this 'feature'?

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Guest asrequested

I would think just setting a space limit, and if the limit is filled, have it automatically resume, and disallow further pausing, and/or transcoding.

 

If you add another drive, and designate that as your transcode drive, you'll probably never have any issues. I have a 525GB drive as my transcode drive.

Edited by Doofus
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Nothing triggers it because it has to be there before hand in order to use it. In the future I imagine we'll allow you to set a limit and then you can just set the limit very small.

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  • 1 month later...
dr_faulkner

Unfortunately, Its reached the point where I can no longer use Emby as it trashes my server every day. I can recover it, but my family and friends are not computer experts - My wife has been without tv for 5 days whilst I was away because of this fatal flaw

 

 

Can you please refund my money

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Why don't you move the directory to a drive with more space that won't fill up until this feature is implemented?

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PenkethBoy

Lol

 

In post #2 i mentioned that - and have been waiting for the penny to drop

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dr_faulkner

With a 4 tuner HD card this bug can unnecessarily write a heap of data to the drive. I do not want my main storage spaces virtual disk flogged and its performance seriously degraded for no reason other than to work around a serious bug that should be urgently fixed. Even if I added a dedicated 1TB drive it would be filled in a few days, and TV would presumably cease to function. Sure it won't crash the server but its still unusable so how is that a real solution?

 

The pause buffer sometimes fills regardless of whether anyone is even watching tv. Why is transcoding even necessary in this scenario? If transcoding ceased when no-one was actually watching tv (or at the very least, when no clients were connected) then the problem would not be nearly so bad. Why doesn't Emby do this anyway instead of pointlessly writing data to the disk?

 

 

Am setting up an hourly scheduled task to flush the pause buffer directory. Hopefully that will provide a band aid solution.

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Guest asrequested

I have a feeling your problem is that the temp files are not being purged. They should be, automatically. When I was transcoding all of my tv recordings (I have 6 tuners), my transcode drive never came close to being filled. So that may be something that you should take a look at.  

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  • 2 weeks later...
dr_faulkner

I have a scheduled script running every hour to delete the ts files in the pause buffer folder - which appears to be an effective workaround for the time being...

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  • 4 months later...
dr_faulkner

This is still problematic for me as the tuner is constantly writing to the C:\public\videos folder on my OS drive (a small SSD) and I have to delete the temporary files every 1 hour which causes the tv to stop playing - If I could get it to write to a different drive I could set the delete batch job to only run once a day so tv viewing is not interrupted. 

 

Have tried editing registry to repoint the public\videos folder but hauppage tuner still writes to C:\public\videos!

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In the case of hauppauge, you should be able to configure their buffer location using the WinTV software.

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  • 3 months later...
FordGT90Concept

Had this just happen to me. Why not have a Scheduled Task in Emby under Live TV if a WinTV tuner is detected for purging the Pause Buffer? Should be easy to add and effectively solve the problem.

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FordGT90Concept

Workaround for me:

1. Create a new Basic Task in Task Scheduler.

2. I set it to run daily at 2:30 AM.

3. Executable: point to C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe

4. Arguments: /c del /q "C:\Users\Public\Public Videos\Pause Buffer\*"

/c = what follows is a command to be executed and then close the window

del = command to run

/q = don't ask if it is okay to delete something, just do it (obviously it can't delete files that are currently open but that's okay)

"path\*" = your path may vary but the important thing is the \* at the end. This tells del to remove all files in the directory.

Edited by FordGT90Concept
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as far as i can tell its partly a Emby problem and a WinTv problem in that they do not manage the pause buffer directory at all

 

I have 3 Hauppauge tuners and only see this occasionally but might depend on the quality of you TV signal - i am fortunate as i do not live very far from my transmitter.

It happens with other tuners as well.  I'm using HDHomeRuns and see this as well.

 

@@FordGT90Concept that will delete some of these files but not the ones that are locked.  Those presently require an Emby restart.

Edited by cayars
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PenkethBoy

@@cayars - dont copy stuff out of context, missing out half what i said in a 10 month old thread - and if people moved the pause buffer for wintv to a bigger drive and not their c: drive as i suggested previously then this becomes a non issue

 

As for HDHR - it does not have a pause buffer on the PC as its a network resource. Besides it cant use the wintv pause buffer as it has no knowledge of it. 

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dr_faulkner

Yes - I installed a dedicated drive just for the pause buffer and have a daily scheduled task to clean up the approx. 100Gb of pause buffer files that accumulate, and this does indeed work around the issue.

 

However, although there is a work-around this is a serious issue that means a default installation of Emby Server configured for TV can (and will) crash your server. That is not good and should have been rectified some time ago IMHO.

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PenkethBoy

The pause buffer is set with win TV not Emby

 

Unless you mean transcode temp which is different

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