Thanks Paul

I test a few scenarios and get you the results.

Jimmy

Paul

I've done some more investigating.

I have installed filemon and I see the polling you were talking about. It appears to be every 7 minutes on my machine....

... but ...

... even though Dabdig data is being loaded totally corectly into gbpvr.mdb it appears that is not enough to cause the recording to work. It is also necessary for me to restart the recording service !

I was wondering if I could find any data that the recording service changed when I restarted it so I looked for all the .mdb files and anything else which changed its timestamp when I restarted the service. Surprisingly, nothing changes except for the GBPVRRecordingService.exe.log. This log file does not shed any light on the subject, but does confirm that gbpvr has now found the new dabdig entry on restarting the service.

In order to be thorough I copied the gbpvr.mdb at three points :-

a) Before Dabdig has run

b) After Dabdig had run but before I restarted the service

c) After restarting the service

I used a hex editor, which has a file comparison function, to do a byte by byte comparision and while clearly the file has changed from step a) to b) - it has not changed one byte between step b) and step c)

As I say, I cannot find anything else in the gbpvr directory that has changed between step b) and c).

My suggestion at this stage is that after inserting something into gbpvr.mdb it is necessary to automatically restart the recording service. This will have the downside of interrupting any recording that is in progress, but, I believe it will only miss a few seconds of recording.

Remember that gbpvr forum message I quoted which said

---

The internal components (tv guide etc) have the benefit of being able to ask the recording service to reload its schedule at any time. This functionality will also be available to plugins from the next release.

---

This doesn't say "restart the recording service" but rather "ask the recording service to reload its schedule" This is presumably what we need to do, but I don't think there's a way available to us.

Can you think of anything else I should look at ?

Again - great work

Jimmy

I will send you a new beta of DABDig that allows you to stop/start the recording service.

I consider this a temporary bodge though - but may well be good enough for now.

When you get it - just run DABDig once and then edit the updated dabdig.ini - to set

GBPVRAllowForceExit=1

DABDig creator

Edited by Paul Webster on Monday, September 26, 2005 - 5:35:07 PM

Thanks Paul

This version is working reliably. I haven't confirmed that resarting the service in the middle of a recording causes some data to be missed, but, even if it is the case it's worth.

Thanks again for a very swift resonse and great program

OK.

I'll turn down the heat on that back-burner issue for now

I do expect that this service is performing the recording - so I think it would be more than missing a bit - it would probably mess that recording up completely.

But - it would only happen for consecutive recordings.

Odd though - maybe the underlying database libraries that he uses are caching something so he does not see something new come in.

If you schedule something using his GUI then I expect that either it is the recording service itself that is providing the GUI - so it knows what has been requested - or the GUI provider somehow sends a message to the recording service.

DABDig creator

I'm in the middle of changing my ATI Radeon VIVO card with the more recent Hauppauge HVR-2200. As WinTV doesn't support this card yet, but GB-PVR does, I'm setting up that to do my recordings. So, next step is to get the current GB-PVR (v1.3.11) to take input from Digiguide/DABDig.

As it stands at the mo, DABDig assumes GB-PVR is an older version using an Access mdb file for it's schedule database. Now it uses SQLite. However, I've found that using GB-PVR's own command-line driven schedule application, I can control the recordings very easily. For example, calling schedule.exe can be done with these parameter examples;

-channel 12 -start "2008-03-12 14:40" -stop "2008-03-12 15:20" -name "Property Ladder" -pre 1 -post 3

-channel 12 -start "2008-03-12 14:40" -minutes 60 -name "Property Ladder"

-channel 12 -start "2008-03-12 14:40" -seconds 240 -name "Property Ladder"

-channel 12 -start now -seconds 240 -name "Property Ladder" -pre 1 -post 3

My question is (a bit obviously) can we please have either an updated GBPVR section in DABDig.ini or a new GBPVR2 section that we can use to point to GB-PVR's schedule application and pass the right paramters to it. I've been told I can this by editing the video marker in DG, but I'd prefer to do it through DABDig as I'm already familiar with RedRat setup using that.

You should be able to cheat for now by changing the configuration in your dabdig.ini

Make a back-up and then change

usegbpvr=0

usewintvpvr=1

WinTVPVRPath=full path (without trailing \) to directory containing schedule.exe

WinTVPVRCmd=schedule.exe

WinTVPVRCmdOverride=-channel $CP -start "$DY-$DM-$DD $DH:$DN" -minutes $LM -name "$TI"

YOu should not need the pre/post because DABDig already calculates that and adjusts the length - which you can adjust via PlayIn and PlayOut in dabdig.ini

DABDig creator

Edited by Paul Webster on Sunday, February 15, 2009 - 9:50:54 PM

Have tried that without success I'm afraid. Is there a way I can get DABDig to log what it's calling and passing as parameters when it runs? dabdig.txt just logs the Digiguide data it's using.

That way I can check everything's setup Ok and calling GB-PVR's schedule.exe correctly.

I can call GB-PVR's schedule manually, but it's not being called from DABDig currently.

Thanks ....

Nick.

Update to last message - all OK. GB-PVR's schedule runs Ok and the background recorder does it's job.

Many thanks for your input Paul.

OK - good news.

Did you have to make changes to what I suggested above?

Also - FYI - to enable more logging (and in particular the command line being used when it does the command line substitution, try setting TraceFlags=4 in dabdig.ini

Output goes to screen and dabdig.txt

DABDig creator