It seems as though every so often, for no reason I can fathom, TVHeadEnd creates a recording with bad timing. In other words if the show is a half hour long, XBMC displays the running time as some longer period, such as approximately an hour, hour and a half, two hours, or even a much longer time such as 24 hours - those are not the exact amounts, just approximations. This can happen on a recording of any length and the time shown is always longer than the actual time. When this happens, if I attempt to fast forward or rewind, XBMC seems to sit there forever before making the requested move, as if it has to do some huge calculation before it can figure out where it should jump to, and it's very frustrating when that happens.
The problem appears to be in the recording file itself, since if I copy it off the server and attempt to play it in something other than XBMC, it shows pretty much the same issue. I cannot detect any pattern as to when or why it happens - it's not confined to any one channel or group of channels, or time of day or anything like that.
I don't know exactly how to describe this issue other than that. Has anyone else seen this? Is there any way to keep it from happening?
Is this with recordings set using the XBMC frontend and if so, which version of the addon are you using ? I have some series recordings set up on TVH and have not come across anything like you describe so far. These were set up on the backend though, which is why I wondered if it is a mis-communication somewhere between the addon and the backend.
Also, does the backend show these weird times, or does it show them correctly, but still record extra stuff ?
They were set using the backend, since there's no easy way to set some of the recording options in XBMC. In the "Finished Recordings" tab it always shows the correct length, but I suspect it's just moving that from the "Upcoming Recordings" tab once the recording is completed, in other words I don't think it's reading that value from the file itself.
And actually it's not recording anything extra, it's just that XBMC thinks it has. If I record a half hour show and XBMC reports it as being a 2 hour show, when I play it XBMC will hesitate a bit and then jump to what it considers the 1:30 mark (but what is the actual beginning of the file) and start playing there. This would not even be a big issue if it didn't screw up the ability to jump forward and backward in the recording.
I've seen it too from time to time. It can be the other way around as well, e.g. a 30 minute recording will show up as ~30 seconds, making the recording unplayable. I haven't actually investigated it further, it could be that the recording just failed for some reason.
I just wish I had some clue as to what causes it to happen. Does TVHeadEnd write some kind of time code information into the .ts files it creates? If so, is there any sort of Linux utility that can be run once a show is recorded that will detect and attempt to repair any such problems?
By the way I do think that short recordings are more likely caused by temporary or permanent loss of signal, though in my experience TVHeadEnd is much more tolerant of that than say MediaPortal. Those have really not been an issue for me since moving to TVHeadEnd.
@xbmclinuxuser: I experimented with running ProjectX on the finished recordings using a post-processor command in tvheadend, though I didn't use it long enough to notice any improvements.
Thanks negge but I was hoping for something a bit easier to install and in particular something that does not require Java. I don't like Java for at least a couple of reasons, and don't have it installed on any of my systems. And since you say you didn't see any improvements, I think I'll pass on that one.
I did see improvements in that it actually said it fixed a lot of errors from time to time, most of my issues was getting the script to run reliably etc. I usually watch something while it's recording so once the post-processing job kicks in it can screw things up since my script swapped the original for the fixed version of the file. YMMV, at least give it a try. I don't know of any other MPEG-TS fixers that work on Linux, and installing Java is not the end of the world.