Recorded TV HD and Echo

[barnabas1969]

I didn't install a beta or alpha... I just installed the one on the main download page of the website.

[yatyas]

So far, RTVHD is working just fine... both on my HTPC and on my extenders (including the Echo). As stated above, if it continues to work without any stability problems for the next two weeks, I'll be paying for the product right away. It's the most beautiful DVR interface I've ever seen (I like the "List View" in black).

Still stable?

[barnabas1969]

Well, I moved to the latest beta to get some of the new features. It's been pretty stable. It has crashed a few times while navigating the menus, but all I've had to do is go back into it and it works fine.

Last night though, it lost all of my "Watched" indicators. I don't know why.

[glugglug]

I tried it like the first month it was out and again this week. Both times somewhat unstable. With the current one, first of all, i got messages in my event log about the Recorded TV HD Service hanging on startup. And also, it made the part of startup that happens after login super slow (like it made my PC take about a minute longer to get on the network), until I changed the service startup from "Automatic" to "Automatic (Delayed Start)".
Once it started up, it was nice on the local PC, but crashed after a few minutes on the XBOX 360 extender. Trying again and skipping forward in the recording made it crash faster. So leaving it off for now for WAF as I would like to be switching all my extenders to this new PC.

I suspect the slow startup and instability while others don't have issues could be because I have over 1200 recordings, and with comskip files for most of them which it shows in an awesome way. I'm wondering if it could also be that I set it for the "list view", which I like better being able to see more series to choose from at once than the default view? Speed wise on the local PC the current version is far better than when I tried it before (could just be because my Recorded TV folder is now a 4 drive pool), but not so much on the extender.

[barnabas1969]

@Glugglug: Do you have the commercial skip indicator turned on (where it overlays the timeline with colors to indicate the position of the commercials)? If so, try turning that off. I found RTVHD to be very unstable with this feature turned on.

[glugglug]

Yes, I did. I also had the # button to go to Recorded TV HD enabled (since the XBOX 360 Universal remote doesn't have a Recorded TV button), and read a post where he thought that feature might be unstable earlier today.

I guess I could give it another shot with these two features disabled.

[glugglug]

Looks like you're right, showing where the commercials are was somehow causing it to crash. Actually, it looks like its an interaction between having RecordedTV HD show the commercial gaps and the SkipDisplay=SkipBar setting on DVRMSToolbox. If I switch DVRMSToolbox SkipDisplay setting to "None", this also improves the speed and stability of RecordedTV HD.

[barnabas1969]

RTVHD definitely has its quirks, but since I turned off the commercial skip indicator, the versions available in the past 6-12 months have worked more than 95% of the time without any issue. The worst thing I've experienced is having to back out of RTVHD to the main Media Center menu and then get back in. That happens once every week or so (and we use RTVHD exclusively on 5 TV's). Not enough of an issue to complain about, considering the awesome interface of RTVHD.

[glugglug]

RTVHD interface stopped responding to remote buttons twice when watching a show while it is recording using the RTVHD skipbar display instead of the DVRMSToolbox one. I think it is triggered when the commercials XML file is rewritten by comskip while watching the show. I guess I will be leaving that feature off.