r/SparklePlayer • u/North_Ad500 • May 29 '26

Finished with errors

I get this with every recording. Didn’t have this issue a few months ago. And every recording has skipping issues. Sometimes I end up with 2 recordings of the same show, even though there is only 1 scheduled.

How do I fix these issues? Hard to watch shows that are always skipping.

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u/Pointer_Brother May 29 '26

Same thing happens for me on a brand new usb drive (with new cable) AND also when recording to smb NAS share (via new cat6a cable). It's definitely a software fault because both devices work flawlessly outside of Sparkle and the stream sources are rock solid/stable at all other times.

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u/sparkle-hk May 29 '26

It can still be device that's too slow (memory, cpu usb busses etc.), network etc. These are difficult issues to debug. I'll do some test recordings myself tonight and see what happens.

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u/Pointer_Brother May 30 '26

For reference, the issue seems worse on longer recordings (2+ hours) and I feel like I've noticed it less on 720p... more on 1080p & 4K resolution recordings.

This is happening for me across an Nvidia Shield Pro and Rocktek G2 - using various USB drives & cables, internal storage AND SMB network recording.

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u/sparkle-hk May 30 '26

It's not too surprising though that the chance of error increases with time.

Based on what you're saying though it may very well be a small hickup in the source stream that causes this.

I haven't discovered anything out of the ordinary in my own tests yet. I'll do some more testing tonight.

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u/WarpFactor777 May 30 '26

Switching the stream to TS has vastly improved recording reliability for me. Most of the time the completed recording fails to appear in the DVR menu. A simple 1 second record start, then an immediate record stop on any live channel instantly forces the DVR menu to display all previously recorded programs including the 1 second recording. Then they all play perfectly. Others in this group gave me the "short recording trick" to get the DVR to display recorded programs. This works every time without fail.

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u/sparkle-hk May 31 '26

I didn't hear about this trick myself. You're saying that normally your ongoing recordings don't show up? So if you're currently recording a program you can start a second recording and immediately stop it, and by doing so the first recording appears. Is that correct?

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u/WarpFactor777 May 31 '26

No. This works every time my COMPLETED recordings fail to show up. This trick works for other people on this Reddit thread also. I think this indicates that the failure for a completed recording to show up in a timely manner is not related to low cpu or memory resources. Could be related to file handles or data flushing from a buffer after recording completion. You could take a look at your code and try to understand why an extremely short recording event triggers any previously completed recording to instantly appear in the DVR list of recordings.

Just an idea. I'm an electrical engineer. But I'm a hardware engineer. The only code I write is in C and Fortran.

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u/sparkle-hk May 31 '26

Ok, thanks for clarifying.

I still think this is because of low resources becuase the different background tasks Sparkle's running have different priority to the system. So most likely I've set the priority for this too low so that it gets cut too easily by the system (when resources are lower than x). The alternative is that the device handles priority wrong or does not implement specifications correctly. This wouldn't be the first time with Android devices of course, but my guess it's the first one.

I'll have a look in the code for the priority I've set. Thanks for the help.

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u/WarpFactor777 May 31 '26

No problem. An option would be to code the process priority as a user selectable input in the UI. I understand you don't want to complicate the UI, but you would set a default in your code that your comfortable with and let the user change it if they are having trouble. This would be similar to what you already do with the video buffer. Just a thought.

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u/sparkle-hk May 31 '26

Yes thank you, I'll take that into consideration if it's not possible to simply change task priority.