Sundtek Support Forum

VU+ is also following this discussion now.

Ok, good to know.

I have basically now written everything I know about the problem here, but I can still report if something new comes up. I still have the recording files for each individual problem (PMT missing, sound disappearing, recording ending unexpectedly) if you or VU+ want to investigate them, but since they are relatively large files, I would prefer an external location to upload them to.

Basically what I would like to find out (I'm sure you and VU+ would, too ) where exactly the problem is and if I could avoid it somehow, by changing software image, updating / downgrading drivers or something like that. Of course I know I could probably avoid it by recording only one program at a time, but that just does not seem reasonable given that I only upgraded from my old Dreambox (that could easily do 4 recordings at a time) to get a box with a better hardware in terms of processor, memory, flash etc. resources. The biggest issue I think is the unpredictability, sometimes the recordings seem to be error-free even if there are 4 recordings at the time and sometimes issues occur with only two simultaneous recordings, maybe due to difference in what has been done at the same time (changed channels, watched previous recordings etc.)

If PMT Timeouts occur please check the signal strength.

Zitat

/opt/bin/mediaclient --readsignal=0 -d /dev/dvb/adapter1/frontend0
and/or
/opt/bin/mediaclient --readsignal=0 -d /dev/dvb/adapter2/frontend0

Also you can enable the logfile to see if there are any Transport Stream errors

Zitat

/opt/bin/mediaclient --loglevel=max
tail -f /var/log/mediasrv.log

Signal strength was 99%, BER 0 all the time when I monitored it yesterday. Also, PAT / PMT errors, like all the other problems (audio disappearing and recordings ending unexpectedly) only appear if there are some recordings at the same time, I've never seen those if there are no recordings in the background at the same time.

A little correction to my report from yesterday, it seems that all the recordings from the evening were NOT ok. One of the recordings had ended after 40 minutes when it was scheduled to end at 1 hour and 10 minutes. The recording may have ended at the same time when either a live channel was changed in the box or, more likely, when my wife started to watch a previous recording from the hard disk.

I will take a look at the recording file a little later with a TS analyzer to see if it gives me any clues what went wrong before the recording unexpectedly ended. I will also take a look at the other recording (the one that had PMT errors) on PID level and see if there are any clues.

hmm the problem is that command is only useful during a recording, but you can still crosscheck that way.

If you have such a file can you provide us a sample so we can check the videostream?

Additionally you can check the signal strength:

Zitat

/opt/bin/mediaclient --readsignal=0 -d /dev/dvb/adapter1/frontend0
or
/opt/bin/mediaclient --readsignal=0 -d /dev/dvb/adapter2/frontend0

If Audio just disappears there are could be a few possibilities (also shows up who is responsible):
* Signal strength issues (Sundtek)
* USB Performance issues (VU+/Sundtek)
* Codec issues (VU+)

Ok, good to know I'll try to find some time to do some testing today, hopefully I can reproduce the problem by just adding some random recordings, taking the pid information and then check if any of the recordings has problems.

Signal should be fine, at least every time I've checked the values, they have been near perfect. Also, I have seen no problems in live signal when I've had no recordings or in the recordings (or live) if I have only one recording at the time, which also I think makes the signal issue unlikely. However, it is not a big task to confirm that as well anyway while I'm on it.

As far as the codecs go, there seems to be another issue with Dolby Digital tracks in general, them not being played when I enter a service with DD sound track and I need to go and put the "downmix" setting on and off again to get the DD audio tracks played, but I do not think the recording audio issues are related to that. All the recordings with audio problems have been pretty basic MPEG2 SD video / one PCM stereo audio track stuff, so nothing special with the codecs at all.

Anyway, I'll get back to you this evening once I get some testing done.

Hi,

I'm having some serious recording issues with VU+ Duo and two Sundtek USB tuners and I try to figure out where the exact problem is. I'm relatively new to VU+ Duo and USB tuners having recently upgraded from Dreambox 7025 with internal cable tuners and therefore I have not only of course tried a couple of different image distributions (OpenPLI and now VTi), but also installed at least two if not three different Sundtek driver versions usually using the http://www.sundtek.com/media/sundtek_installer_development.sh script. The latest ones I'm currently using are the ones from April 4th.

Now, to the problems: the main issue is that some recordings do not recorded as a whole, they may get recorded for 10 minutes or so or just couple of seconds sometimes. This seems to be related of having multiple recordings going on at the same time.

Also, sometimes the recordings get recorded but they lose sound at some point. The sound may come back after a while or not. It seems that other recordings starting / ending in the background can at least sometimes affect this, although I have not confirmed this. Yesterday I witnessed a situation where two recordings from the same multiplex ended at the same time and the live picture (also from the same multiplex) lost sound. Service selection brought the sound back.

I did some investigation and noticed that I had an older version of the VTi image (2.4), having drivers from February, so I updated the DVB drivers from the official VU plus site to the latest ones. However, this did not at least completely solve the problem, since after that I made some test recordings, having 3 simultaneous recordings from one multiplex and two from another one and one of the recordings (a one from the multiplex that had 3 recordings at the same time) did not have the sound.

Anyway, as I said, I basically wanted to ask whether this might be a problem in Sundtek drivers or is it the VU DVB drivers that are causing this? Knowing one or two things about the DVB because of my work background, I would imagine it could be a problem of certain PIDs not getting recorded, maybe even a demux limitation of some kind, but you of course know much better which part of the recording procedure is handled by the VU drivers and which part is under the Sundtek drivers and hopefully have a clue where to start looking to get this fixed