Went to bed last night expecting several shows to record, a two hour "48 Hours", "Colony", "Local News at 11", and "SNL".
Got up this morning, tried to watch Tv on Client in bedroom and got error "No tv tuner available..." error (tried several channels including on that supposed to point to different physical tuner).
Went downstairs to the Server and it's playing live tv (not any of the channels that were supposed to record last night), and MC would not respond to any remote or mouse, eventually it went all white and a "not responding" box appeared. Meanwhile, I can see that two instances of CBS channel are active on the tuners (web config page).
Restarted MC, tried to create output a log file but that process went into not responding also, so killed it and tried again. Of course this log came out completely normal. Rebooted the hung tuner. Verified live tv on Server and Client working again.
So it looks like one hour into "48 Hours" (around 10pm), MC got screwed up, locked up one tuner then changed to another, and continued recording for 10 hours, which is exactly when I tried to force the MC Server to close this morning. The result is one 7GB file and a second 68GB file! Sadly, the next 3 shows that were supposed to record, did not happen at all.
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I really wish MC had a way to ALERT it's human administrator when something like this goes wrong. Send an email or text when ever it abnormally changes tuners during a recording, or fails to start a scheduled recording, etc. Then anyone could reboot the Server and confirm normal operation (either directly or remotely).
I already have this setup for my network tuners. I have a small program on the Server that pings the IP's of the tuners every 10 seconds. If it misses a ping, the program immediately sends an email to my phone which alerts me that the tuner is down or rebooted.
SOLVED: new version of MC seems to be MUCH more crash resistant for tv recording.Thank you!