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[Bozer]

I used WMC for many years and recently started using JRiver. I tried it first and was glad that I could watch all my recorded shows. Now with the flurry of updates in the last couple months I found that my older recordings just cause the HDD light to go on solid and the CPU to go 100%. So I tried some recordings that were recorded by JRiver last month and they will do the same thing. I just watched a recording made 2 days ago and it worked perfectly like it used to with about 15% cpu and very little hard disk activity. The disk checks out as good and is only about a year old. I am very dismayed that about a terabyte of recordings are trashed by this program. Any help out there?

[Yaobing]

Provide some concrete information if you want help.  Recent updates do not cause any problems in playing past recordings.  I can play my recordings recorded two months ago, and for that matter, two years plus two months ago.

[RoderickGI]

I can confirm that my WMC recordings from July 2013 are still playing fine, on my HTPC Server and Workstation Client.

There must be something else going on in your system. See if you can find some sample recordings online somewhere, and test if they will play. Or if you have windows 7, these is at least one sample wtv file installed with WMC.

[JimH]

What you describe could be caused by antivirus software.

[Bozer]

I have Windows 10 Pro 64 bit with the programs on a SSD and a 2 TB drive to hold all the TV recordings. I am using the default settings with Windows Defender for AV and have tried turning it off. Actually that was the first thing I tried. My system is AMD based and powerful enough to play bluerays with no issues so I feel the hardware is up to the task at hand. I realize this isn't something every one is experiencing because I did search the threads before posting this. I guess I was hoping someone would have had this happen at one time in the past and would be able to make some suggestions as to how to proceed I find it odd that the newest recordings play without issue but anything older than a week or so will play with various levels of success. I was able to watch one show from about 3 months ago for ten minutes and the picture froze while the sound continued and another did the opposite with the sound freezing and the picture continuing. one of the recordings continued after using the skip function and completely froze up after another few minutes. Older recordings will not play at all. Yhey just display the JRiver icon in the middle of the screen with a message about something went wrong.

[Yaobing]

Are these JRiver recordings or WMC recordings?

[Bozer]

Both actually I am going to verify usability of a couiple WMC files right now. I do not know how to do that with the JRiver files as the are not in one file like a regular MPEG.

[RoderickGI]

I do not know how to do that with the JRiver files as the are not in one file like a regular MPEG.

There are multiple files if you are using the JTV recording format. In that case just play the JTV file. But only an installation of MC can do that, and you need the full set of files from the recording available to do that.

If you are recording in TS format, there will be just one file for each recording. Any JTV files that you find are left over Time Shifting files, not scheduled recordings.

PS:I posted the above before I read this new post from you.

I was able to watch one show from about 3 months ago for ten minutes and the picture froze while the sound continued and another did the opposite with the sound freezing and the picture continuing. one of the recordings continued after using the skip function and completely froze up after another few minutes. Older recordings will not play at all. Yhey just display the JRiver icon in the middle of the screen with a message about something went wrong.

I'm sorry but that really sounds like an ongoing hard disk failure that has been occurring for some time. The only alternative is that something on you PC is corrupting the contents fo the drive.

I use and recommend HD Sentinel (note that the site is either down or very slow right at this moment) as it is very good at predicting hard drive failure. I don't know how you verified the drive yesterday, but I think you need to look at it more carefully.

If you find and download some sample files, make sure you save them to your SSD for testing, to eliminate the hard drive as a potential failure point.

[Bozer]

I spent yesterday replacing the HDD that the tv recordings are on. I retested it and it was failing after a few minutes of stress. The thing that was throwing me was newer recordings would play fine. Unbeknownst to me, JRiver had started placing my recordings on the drive that contains movies and family files. I lost many TV shows but was able to recover the last weeks worth of shows which somewhat redeem me and JRiver in the wife's eyes. Thanks for the feedback everyone.

[Yaobing]

Unbeknownst to me, JRiver had started placing my recordings on the drive that contains movies and family files.

When you ran TV setup in MC, you were asked to select a location.  You would have known

The drive MC selects automatically for you is the drive with largest free space, but you always have the final say where that location should be.

[CountryBumkin]

The drive MC selects automatically for you is the drive with largest free space....

The logic may not be perfect.
I have C: (64GB SSD), D: (1TB HD), G: (10TB RAID) and H: (10TB RAID) all on the same server. MC picks drive "D" which is not the largest. However that is the drive I prefer to use, so all is good.

[Yaobing]

The logic may not be perfect.
I have C: (64GB SSD), D: (1TB HD), G: (10TB RAID) and H: (10TB RAID) all on the same server. MC picks drive "D" which is not the largest. However that is the drive I prefer to use, so all is good.

I wonder if there is a logic error on my part.  However, could it be that your RAID drives do not have free space left on them (considering they are 10 TB, that is unlikely though)?

[Bozer]

JRiver changed the drive recorded to all by itself without my input. I didn't realize it until i had the new drive in and while setting a path for the recorded tv and buffer I noticed a Video/recorded tv folder on my movie drive that had about several recordings for shows from the last week. If it had told me it had done that I could have figured it out sooner.

[Yaobing]

JRiver changed the drive recorded to all by itself without my input. I didn't realize it until i had the new drive in and while setting a path for the recorded tv and buffer I noticed a Video/recorded tv folder on my movie drive that had about several recordings for shows from the last week. If it had told me it had done that I could have figured it out sooner.

Is "Video/Recorded TV" the folder JRiver wrote recordings to?

[RoderickGI]

It sounds like this problem actually saved some of your recordings, but also prevented you from realising there was a problem with your hard drive for a while.

Pity the drive was failing. There are some good file recovery tools around, even some free ones. You may be able to get more back, if you think it is worth it. Although if you are using the JTV recording format, the loss of one component could mean the whole program was lost. I had good results with "Zero Assumption Recovery" last year, but if you use that be careful where you download it from. Lots of scams and misdirection. I believe this is the author's site: http://www.z-a-recovery.com/ I used it free as I was recovering images.

The folk over at EaseUS also have some reasonable file recovery software, and some of it is free.

[Bozer]

Actually I did not look at the Library Setting as I lost the library, but I had set the TV to go to a smaller drive. It chose the largest drive in the box per the defaults. And I tried EASE but it could only save fragments so it was all lost.  I have had worse things happen. Thanks for the help while I wass figuring this out.