Bug? - tuner selection for recording

Beta Community DVR Beta
#1

Last night we had two shows scheduled to record during the same time period. We were also watching live one of those two shows on two separate TVs. I have a total of 6 tuners - 3 Connects.

Only one of the two shows recorded - the second, which was being watched live on two TVs did not get recorded.

The logs indicate that no tuner was available, however, I checked the tuner status on all 3 Connects and 3 tuners were available at the time.

Here’s a snippet of the logs:

2017/01/29 22:26:43 [DVR] Starting job 1485741600-ch5.1 Dateline NBC on ch=[5.1]
2017/01/29 22:26:43 [ERR] Failed to start stream on channel 5.1 via 1045C956: got http response code 503
2017/01/29 22:26:44 [DVR] Error running job 1485741600-ch5.1: open /Volumes/Channels-DVR/TV/Dateline NBC/2017-01-29-2226 Dateline NBC 2017-01-29 S25E16 Tom Brokaw The First 50 Years.mpg: no such file or directory

This sequence appears int he logs for the 90 minute run of the show.

#2

Do all three connects have a lineup set?

#3

The “no such file or directory” error is strange. Usually means disk error or out of space. Are other recordings happening fine since?

#4

Yes, all three tuners have the lineups set and there is about 4TB of free space on the disk. Other recordings are working fine.

#5

BTW - the disk error is referencing the file that would be had the recording been successful.

#6

Yes the DVR basically failed to create the file so it could start saving the video data to it.

#7

Does this directory exist? Are there other recordings inside it?

#8

/Volumes/Channels-DVR/TV/ exists but not the sub-directory.

#9

I am not a coder by any stretch of the imagination, but reading the logs I assumed that it could not write tot he file because there was nothing to write. From the logs I see it only trying to read from the one tuner and always receiving a 503 response. What I don’t understand is why it never tried any of the other 3 tuners that I confirmed were idle as this was happening.

#10

The second tuner was used as expected. It prints “Starting recording” after the file is opened, but the open failed.

#11

1485741600-ch5.1 was, in fact, busy. But, 3 others - 1 from one Connect and 2 from another - were free. Thse are the ones that it never attempted to try.

#12

It did attempt to use them. There is no log message printed for each attempt.

#13

I believe you but I am curious how you can be certain it attempted to use them if there is no log entry. I have located and corrected (I hope) a permissions issue so in the end it may be simply just that and nothing more.

Thanks for your help.

And, most importantly thanks again for a terrific “beta”!

#14

I know because the code only attempt to open a file after it successfully connects to the tuner.

What was the permissions issue? Seems the DVR was unable to create new folders inside the TV directory for some reason. I wonder what caused the permissions to be incorrect.

#15

This bug is fixed in the latest version v2017.01.30.2232. Permissions errors during recording jobs will be printed to the log.

#16

I had initially installed the DVR on my Synology NAS. About 3 weeks ago I moved it off of the NAS and onto a Mac Mini. In doing so I left the recording directories on the NAS and mounted them to the Mini. The databases were copied to the Mini and everything worked fine.

Over the weekend I rebooted the Mini to install updates and when it came back up it reattached the NAS drive but as an incorrect user. Re-mounting with the correct user / permissions have corrected the issue. I still have to do a “reboot” test to make sure i comes back up ok.

In doing this I did find another very obscure problem with special characters in the file systems. The “:” is interpreted differently on the NAS vs the Mini. So, for example I have two “NCIS: Los Angeles” directories - one from running native on the NAS and one from running on the Mini with the NAS drive mounted. This is an edge case and a result of moving the DVR from system to system so no big deal in my opinion.