5 min recorded out of 30, but history shows OK?

[adam1991]

Man with a Plan tonight at 8:30 recorded about 5 minutes and that was it. I validated this by looking at the recorded file itself.

The weird thing is, history shows that it recorded successfully and completely. Brooklyn Nine-Nine, also recording at 8:30, did record just fine. And Superstore and Last Man Standing, both at 8:00, recorded just fine.

It wasn't that I got black screen or something because the tuner went out. It just stopped recording. Normally it's a 3GB file, but this one showed 523MB.

I've never seen this before. The recording history throws me for a loop here. Any ideas?

OTA with HD Homerun quad tuner.

EDIT: as I typed the above, I was watching WMC showing me that Mom at 9:00 was recording the entire half hour. When it stopped, I went to watch it--and it's the same 5:32 long, not 30 minutes long, and the same 523MB file size. Is this a disk space issue?

I just cleaned up a boatload of stuff, and Broke is now recording. Let's see what happens.

Well, 8 minutes in and Broke is showing 1.42GB, so that's a good sign.

[adam1991]

Revisiting this.

Again, here we are. See this image:




Notice the time, top right--8:29. So the show is still "recording". Notice the recording timeline at the bottom, it clearly knows this is an 8 to 8:30 show.

But as I watch it while it's recording, the timeline looks like it's only 8:05. And in fact, after it stopped, I ended up with a show that's only 5:33 long.

Tuner issue? Maybe as far as WMC knows the signal stopped coming in at that point? So maybe the signal DID stop coming in? That would point to the tuner, or the tuner power supply.

Tuner 0, according to the history. I think other tuner 0 shows have showed this.

I thought if the signal wasn't there, WMC would continue to record but show blank screen. I would swear I've seen that before.

[Space]

I have seen when I have a bad signal that WMC gets a little messed up. It can show that it only recorded a few minutes when it really recorded the whole thing with maybe only a few glitches of programming missing.
Usually when this happens, WMC knows it did not get a good recording, and if it can, it will re-record another airing of that program. It will not always log an error about this, however.

I've never seen it where it would just record black screen if the signal goes away. If the signal goes down for a certain sustained length of time (maybe a minute) it will just stop recording. However if the signal comes in and out (and does not go down for a sustained minute or so), you will see missing parts of the video and glitches throughout and the reported length will not be correct. In some cases the video playback will not work correctly, and you may have to jump over parts of the video to get the remaining recording to play.

At least this is what I've experienced with a HDHomerun Prime with CableCard.

[adam1991]

so you've seen it the other way than what I see. A bad signal will make it think it didn't get the recording, while what I'm seeing is that it thinks it did get the whole recording.

So maybe it's not a bad signal. Or maybe it is.

If WMC has grabbed tuner 0, I have no way of looking at tuner 0 outside of simply playing the currently recording WMC program.

I may just grab another tuner. That's not a very granular test, but absent tuner logging I'm not sure much else will show me anything.

[Space]

No, it can get a bad signal and still think the recording is OK as far as the logs go, it depends on how bad the signal is. If there is another airing of that episode/program it may schedule that to record as well, because it knows it didn't get a perfect recording. If it is minor glitches, it may not consider it failed and won't schedule another airing. It might be based on a percentage of glitches or something, I'm not sure.

To be honest, i don't really have much experience with it since I usually have good signal (I use CableCard), so don't have a lot of experience with OTA where the signal may not be as reliable.

[adam1991]

well, history shows that it recorded the whole thing--so I wouldn't expect it to record another airing.

I don't think this is a matter of OTA signal not being reliable. My antenna is outside up in the air, and when this first started happening I hopped over to the HDHomerun app and tuned in the channel just fine on another tuner.

I just can't really isolate this very well so far.

[adam1991]

happened again last night, and again the "bad" recording (a) looked to WMC like it was going perfectly well, except for the timeline, and (b) actually only recorded 5:31 of show.

There may be one thing constant in all this: the first time firing up for the evening, and firing up two tuners at once. I originally thought this behavior was limited to only one of my four tuners, but further investigation shows that not to be the case.

The sequence is simple: 1:10am machine restart, 3:18am EPG123, maybe I'll watch something in the morning during workout (or maybe not), then nothing until 8pm primetime and it's time to record. And I do believe this doesn't happen if it's only one recording when it first fires up. And I also believe it doesn't happen if, after firing up for one recording, it fires up for two recordings after the first recording is over.

Although, yesterday I restarted Windows twice in a row at around 5:30pm. So the sequence isn't exact every time.