INTERACT FORUM

More => Old Versions => JRiver Media Center 23 for Windows => Topic started by: RussellS on October 09, 2017, 11:28:15 am

Title: "Auto Restart" feature
Post by: RussellS on October 09, 2017, 11:28:15 am
Hi, Back in the middle of last year when MC22 was announced there was a planned feature 'Auto Restart -- If MC dies, it will start again.'

Did this feature ever get implemented. Although I paid for the upgrade to MC22 I never actually got round to loading it (long story) and have now jumped straight from MC21 to MC23. I've done a search in these forums and also in the MC options but I cannot find any reference to an 'Auto Restart' setting.

Thanks

Russell
Title: Re: "Auto Restart" feature
Post by: blgentry on October 09, 2017, 04:32:58 pm
Why would MC die often enough to need to be restarted?  If it's dying, something is wrong.  Right?

Brian.
Title: Re: "Auto Restart" feature
Post by: RussellS on October 09, 2017, 05:34:46 pm
You are absolutely right Brian, there is definitely something wrong. I've been having these crashes since MC20 on a regular basis and I have reported my issues numerous times on this forum and asked for some assistance in trying to get to the bottom of it. I have followed all the suggestions (disable antivirus, replace memory etc.) all to no avail and have posted logs in the hope that it may point to the cause of my problem. However I don't think the logs ever got looked at and I just felt like I was banging my head against a brick wall and not getting anywhere.

When I upgraded the PC to Windows 10 I actually thought it was fixed because MC didn't crash for a couple of weeks. However this was short lived because it started crashing again shortly afterwards. At that point I gave up with MC for quite a while and used Plex instead, hence my absense from these forums since September last year.

This was the last forum thread regarding this issue: https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,105046.msg732796.html#msg732796

However I now want to return to MC albeit mainly for music and continue using Plex for movies/TV shows.

So bearing in mind I still have no idea why MC is crashing I thought the option to 'Auto Restart' on a crash would at least guarantee that MC would be running when called upon.
Title: Re: "Auto Restart" feature
Post by: MGD_King on October 09, 2017, 06:06:44 pm
RussellS, when your PC crashes, is there anything in the Windows logs? I wonder if it's not hardware related? Video/sound card drivers? Hard disk failing? I once had a corrupt hard drive that whenever I played a certain track, just one specific track, MC crashed the PC. Turned out to be bad sectors on the hard drive so I replaced the drive and haven't had a problem since. I can't remember if I ever tried playing the track in a different audio player or not to confirm that MC was causing the crash, I was more concerned that more sectors would fail and I would have lost the entire drive's contents.
Title: Re: "Auto Restart" feature
Post by: JimH on October 09, 2017, 06:08:32 pm
That it ran fine for a couple of weeks means that it is probably not MC causing the crash.

A driver is possible.  A bad device.  A bad file.  Plug-ins.  Etc.  The "Weird Problems" thread in my signature has a lot of examples of these kinds of problems.

Antivirus software is always a possible cause.  I see you said that you "disabled" it.  That may not be enough.  What are you using for AV?
Title: Re: "Auto Restart" feature
Post by: tzr916 on October 15, 2017, 07:03:36 pm
If you use MC for tv, MC22 seemed to crash/hang once every week or two when recording tv... MC23 is much much better, but I just had a crash after 75 days without any problems (tv recording again appeared to be the issue). And of course, after the crash no more scheduled recordings fired (until hours later when I discovered what had happened). I don't expect to have another crash for a long while but wouldn't it be awesome if MC did actually incorporate an auto restart feature  ;D

In the mean time, I am trying out an external monitoring program. Fingers crossed:
http://w-shadow.com/blog/2009/03/04/restart-on-crash/
Title: Re: "Auto Restart" feature
Post by: muzicman0 on October 15, 2017, 08:51:32 pm
That it ran fine for a couple of weeks means that it is probably not MC causing the crash.
That it is not MC's fault isn't the point.  I also have VERY intermittent crashes on my server.  It would be nice to not have to worry about it. 

Also, if I am out of town, and streaming something from home that is being transcoded (typical a video), then I can almost guarantee some type of crash.
Title: Re: "Auto Restart" feature
Post by: JimH on October 16, 2017, 07:09:05 am
https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Troubleshooting_Guide

and

antivirus?
Title: Re: "Auto Restart" feature
Post by: tzr916 on October 17, 2017, 07:57:06 am
Appears there's absolutely no interest in incorporating auto restart into JRiver  :(

Another external solution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjD8pje6h74
Title: Re: "Auto Restart" feature
Post by: Hendrik on October 17, 2017, 08:01:12 am
We would be more interested in figuring out why it would need to restart in the first place.
Title: Re: "Auto Restart" feature
Post by: mattkhan on October 17, 2017, 08:30:16 am
We would be more interested in figuring out why it would need to restart in the first place.
how about implementing auto restart with an opt in for automatically triggering a "send diagnostics to jriver" ?
Title: Re: "Auto Restart" feature
Post by: mojave on October 17, 2017, 08:57:24 am
We would be more interested in figuring out why it would need to restart in the first place.
Doesn't the Id have auto restart? Auto restart helps a headless device remain always available.

I loaned a Windows 10 JRiver HTPC to a friend. I put auto start on it because people sometimes shut down JRiver when they are done watching/listening instead of leaving it running. The next person in the family doesn't know how to even access the HTPC to get it to run. They just want to switch sources in the AVR and have it available.