Issues recording NBC prime time

[kraulin]

I have a Ceton quad tuner and windows 7 pro.

Late last TV season, I started having issues recording prime time shows off of NBC here in DC.
Undateable did it last season and at this point I expect it to behave the same come October.
Blindspot is the offender I've documented for this post.

Here's the pattern...
It starts with recording to the first commercial break, stops, and shows a "Recording will be deleted by xx:xx" message for that 13 min segment.
For the shows that are an hour long, it looks as if the first act last 90 min then it'll be deleted by the software leaving you with an incomplete show.

Then, rest of the show will record in a separate instance.
All of the commercial breaks eventually lose video, then lose audio and WMC will show the "weak tv signal" message.
It picks up again when the show starts back up.
and when the final act has concluded, the commercials leading into the nightly news are just fine.

I called Verizon and they said they have nothing to do with it.
They told me to get in touch with NBC and see if they are doing anything to the feed.
I want to know if anyone else has seen this behavior out of WMC.

I recorded it as well on my Verizon Motorola DVR box, and it was fine.

I also recorded shows from all the other networks that evening and everything else worked as it should.
Only NBC seems to be doing what ever to their primetime line up.

For a control, I recorded a daytime show off NBC today and it showed none of the issues laid out here. It recorded as expected.

This is an example of the issue going from show to commercial back to show.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9SR0DC0aJk

This is an example of going from show to promo for next show/series to the local news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VSLZd5ATWY

Here is what WMC shows for blindspot in the recorded tv listing.
https://twitter.com/jf83lbhp4

[dmagerl]

Tune to NBC and then press 411-info on the remote or 411-cntrlD on a keyboard to bring up the wmc debug screen. Then press right arrow on the remote to get to the very last screen, Presentation.

When I tune to NBC, it shows a very very fast flickering between 29/59 frames per sec.

Seems like NBC is having problems.

Edit: I'm watching The Voice, and the show itself is rock solid 59 f/s. The moment a commercial break happens, the frame rate flickers between 29/59. But not all commericals do it. An occasional commercial is rock solid too. When the break is over, the frame rate stabilizes at 59 once again.

If I had to guess, your GPU cant handle the rapid frame rate changes.

[sbaeder]

also a question...did you have closed captions turned on? does it do it with them off? GPU should only affect playback - not recording the stream. Maybe something with Ceton? latest SW and drivers???

But 29/59 could be related to the issue...

[kraulin]

I would hope GTX 670 would be powerful enough.
It's nice to know that I'm not the only one who has this problem.
It may be an nvidia driver issue with 29/59
point of note, I had to use my number pad to navigate to the last panel of debug info since I'm on a desktop.

I had the captioning on so you could see when data was coming through... but it has problems with CC on or off.

[kraulin]

One outstanding question though... what's causing the first act of the show to be fragmented off and have an expiration date ~60 min from when the fragment stops recording.
https://twitter.com/jf83lbhp4

I'm now recording all NBC primetime content as tests,

The Mysteries of Laura did the same thing, recorded 9 min and it expired shortly after the show completed its airing...

How does this happen?

I was under the impression that public broadcasts are not allowed to expire?

[DavidinCT]

I took a look over your twitter pics, I also have a Ceton tuner, I lived with a 4 for about a year and just moved to a 6 a little while ago.

Breaking up recordings can be a few things, signal, tuner issues, I have seen the most of, this used to happen time to time on my 4 but, very rare. I've never seen this on my 6. Normally a reboot solves this issue, with the 4 I have seen heard of this before, scheduling a weekly reboot of your PC should help if not resolve this issue.

The Expired recording, that is a funny one. That is a DRM thing, NBC should not be DRMed (channels that are avaible over OTA, via the FCC can not be protected). This is one of 2 things, Your cablecompany is DRMing shows, or something is funky with your DRM store. I would lean towards your provider. Normally you cable company is sending flags down that they should not be.

You can call and complain about it and if they dont do anything, you can file a FCC complaint and something will be done about it for sure...

BTW...Blindspot was pretty cool, my 7 machine recorded it with no issues.

[rmeden]

You can call and complain about it and if they dont do anything, you can file a FCC complaint and something will be done about it for sure...

I did this against Time Warner. The were setting the do-not-copy flag on all stations *INCLUDING CSPAN* (where copying is specifically allowed).

TIme Warner replied with a B.S. response that said they have contracts with each station that determine if the flag should be set. I had no way to make a response. (my initial complaint included CSPAN as an egregious example)

So, don't count on the F.C.C. helping much. (although boosting the complaint count probably helps more than the actual complaint)

[kraulin]

I'm doing the 411-ctrl-d and I'm not seeing a fluctuation in the frame rate.

It's staying at 59.94014 even through the commercials

This was during 'The Player' on NBC Thursday night.

The Transport.position keeps chugging along keeping great time, so it knows that time is passing

[dwboynton]

Same problem - three weeks in a row, also on "Mysteries of Laura." Using WinTV-DCR-2650 Dual Tuner CableCARD, on Verizon FIOS. Other programs are recording fine; no problem on my wife's Verizon DVR box. The warning comes about ten minutes into the program, and the recording stops at 20 minutes in.

[kraulin]

With NBC I've seen a few issues on my Ceton quad tuner and windows 7 pro with Windows Media Center on Fios.

1. The first act (start of the program to the first commercial break) becomes it's own recording with an expiration date of 150% of the show length. Then one of two things happens.
1.1 That's it, the recording stops and no more of the show is saved.
1.2 A second instance of the show is created and contains the rest of the show, with all of the side effects listed in #2.

2. The whole show records, The content of the show plays but the commercials all lose signal or synchronization. You can watch it, but it garbles up the first 15 seconds to a min after the show resumes as the codec recovers.

The 411 Ctrl-D option shows no 29/59 jitter... that's what's been so amazingly frustrating about this...

It only occurs during prime time.
It's not channel wide.

[kraulin]

NBC tonight was a compete mess!

Nothing recorded more than 9 or 17 min... and Heroes Reborn didn't even start.

From 8 - 11 it was bubkis.