Fatal Hang Crash

[Christoph21x]

Incidence has reduced greatly since undoing the option to grab EPG updates on recordings in Recorder (ie going back to default). When it does start to crap out, it almost always starts between 2330-0030 (then carried on, until reboot). Don't know if any of this has meaning or science or it's all just coincidence.

Do you use a CAM? Maybe limited to just one decryption at a time? Try to limit the CAMs to ¨1¨ in recorder settings resp. TV Service to test. (Mine support a max of 2 channels, for example)
Maybe also a signal quality problem?
Or your machine / drive isn´t performant enough (which I actually never have seen in here being reported...)
Just my two pennies reading this

[fishsticks]

No CAM, all the channels I record are free over to air. There are a few scrambled channels in my scan but I don't record/view them. I might try playing with the CAM settings just to test.

Signal quality- this goes up and down like... Usually I see values between 50-80%, although occasionally as low as 10% for some "smaller" channels. The only time I've not had a stream work was one time at below 5%, even at 10% things work- just with glitches. Most of my issues have been when only recording the main BBC stream which is always the strongest, in the logs you can see these have been 60+. Signal quality issues was the first thing to come to my mind but I've ruled it out because it has happened even when recording BBC1 when it was 87%, I rebooted, still at 87% and continue recording. I have a non-Argus recorder going in parallel to test and that had no issues.

I highly doubt it is machine/drive performance. i3 Ivy Bridge and 4GB RAM, Argus on SSD, recording to spinning drive over SATA. It's a 2.5" 5400RPM drive but again ruled out because has happened when only a single stream was involved.

What makes it software-related to me is the fact that once this gets triggered, the sequence of errors just continues until a reboot at which time recordings automatically restart. Until reboot, Argus tries over and over to start/continue recording but can't- so it's not a temporary drop in performance, signal, etc.

The drive doesn't drop connection to Argus as far as I can tell, recorded programs, etc. still showing up.

I'm also going to test changing the EPG collection start time which is default 0 (midnight) which is suspiciously around the time of day these problems seem to start.

[Christoph21x]

Hi! Really strange. I guess there´s no need playing with CAM settings on that setup.
Could also sound like a driver or card issue of TBS´ cards.
(Using here FireDTV that go to error from time to time and only after hard reset of the cards, they come back working properly. One card there influences also the others (not predictable)

The second setup that you´re running (without errors) - is this on the same machine, same cards, same drivers?

Obviously the recorder answer gets delayed andscheduler runs into timeout (this may explain also ¨already in use¨.. means rather: ¨still in use¨)

[fishsticks]

Hi Christoph.

I thought I'd seen a CAM setting but couldn't find it anyway. There is init delay, etc. but the issue isn't coming out of sleep, it happens while system is up and recording.

Second setup is a consumer DVR box, not HTPC.

For now I've further reduced EPG grabbing intensity and try to reboot every day or 2 when possible to try to keep things going.

I'll wait to try Argus 2.3 before playing with drivers, etc. dot-i was suggesting all this is related to a Windows component that won't be used at all in 2.3 so, if that's the only reason, this should hopefully be fixed.

[fishsticks]

A few more days without errors (and no reboots, either). The only change has been to disable 'grab EPG on recordings & live TV' setting in Recorder settings. Not ideal this time of year with sports events overrunning their time but a whole lot better than no recordings at all!

I see the odd "aborted recording", usually with a second shorter one (e.g. main at 2h hours, aborted, second recording at 20 minutes), not sure if related to EPG domino effect not being picked up. These come up under info, not as errors.