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[csy]

This is a small issue that I've been putting up with because the rest of the MC product is very good, but it keeps irritating me so I thought I would mention it in the hope that the JRiver developers might be able to improve the situation.

My issue is when I stop LiveTV, I end-up with a blank screen and harddrive thrashing for an extended period before being returned to Theater View.  The delay can extend well over a minute sometimes if I've been watching LiveTV for a couple of hours or so. (note I'm recording to a local 1TB harddrive with above average performance, but ideally I would like to record to NAS but this has proven impractical due to absolutely massive delays when stopping LiveTV).

Other family users think the system has locked-up and push all sorts of buttons and the HTPC ends-up in a real mess which I have to restore to an operational state again.  This is not a particularily good user experience.

I would appreciate if stopping LiveTV could be more responsive.

[JimH]

That's obviously not how it should work.  Have you tried updating the driver for the TV device?  Also the video driver.

Theater View uses 3D drawing, and it's switching when you stop TV.

In Theater View options, there are framerate and drawing quality settings you could try adjusting downward.

Under Help, try running the Benchmark program and post the results.

[csy]

Thanks Jim, but the issue is with how MC handles its time-shifting files.  I've observed that MC establishes a temporary directory within the TV Recordings directory and during LiveTV it periodically (at a frequent rate) adds small files, then when LiveTV stops, MC deletes all the files and temporary directory.  The problem is the quantity of the files.  Take tonight for example, LiveTV has been constantly runnning from 5pm to 7pm (2 hours), and the temporary directory clocked-up over 12,000 files, and when I stopped LiveTV the screen went blank while the harddrive thrashed to delete all the 12,000 files, and once deleted then returned me to the Theatre View Menu.

(This massive file handling is blocking me from recording to NAS, as the inherent NAS delay exaggerates the problem 10 fold or more.)

This massive file handling appears to be most unusual compared to other media centre applications I've used.

Can something be done about this?

[Sandy B Ridge]

You could limit the amount of live tv that is recorded in the TV options. Default is 4 hours. If you're not that bothered about it, you could reduce it to minimum.

SBR

[csy]

I have already set it to the minimum setting of 1 hour, but the quantity of temporary files just keeps on accumulating past the 1 hour mark.

[Yaobing]

I have already set it to the minimum setting of 1 hour, but the quantity of temporary files just keeps on accumulating past the 1 hour mark.

They do increase a little over the max time (1 hour in your case) but eventually that will stop.  We do delete stale files as we add new files.  So the total number of files should remain more or less constant, so should the total number of bytes.  For an one hour window, the total should be around 6 GB for an HD channel.

[csy]

Thanks for the additional info, but none the less - the fundamental issue from post 1 remains, which relates to the huge quantity of LiveTV temporary files (be it 1hrs worth or 4hrs, or whatever)

So full-circle to posts 1 & 3, which appears to be design intent, so I'm viewing this as a feature request.

[Scolex]

Does changing the recording format make a difference?

[Yaobing]

This issue is not related to recording format.  We do time-shifting buffering without regard to which format is used for recording.

Some numbers do not add up.  I did a test.  After 1 hour of buffering, I got about 100 files in the folder.  It only took half a second for  MC to delete these files.

csy, if you see much more than ~ 100 files per hour, something is not right.  Send me a log file.

[csy]

Hi Yaobing, thank you for investigating and applying a fix in 17.0.155  The fix works brilliantly.  I'm now seeing it clock up to ~100 files over an hour then it is capped at that, and when I exit LiveTV, I'm very quickly returned to the Theater View menu.  I'm very happy.