<div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><br>o No video. For example, one of the local PBS affiliates<br> -frequently- airs totally black video in place of a show. (This
<br> probably happens once a month, usually in the dead of night when<br> nobody at the station is awake.) They'll air the promo, then cut<br> to black, and then at the end of the hour, the next promo... So<br> there's sync, the card's working, etc, but there's no -content-.
<br>o Crappy, unwatchable video (half-destroyed by static, etc).<br> This is typically because the studio feed crapped out somehow.<br> I've sometimes seen shows slowly degrade from fine to total snow<br> over the course of half an hour. Discovery Channel seems particularly
<br> prone to this sort of failure, at least here.<br>o No audio. I've seen this in ivtv (working w/Hans to track it down<br> in my case), and sometimes the station blows it, too.</blockquote><div><br>
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Add in the zero length file problem. Problems with the card and/or driver that occur,<br>
causing nothing to be recorded at all (not a blank video, just no video at all). Possibly<br>
also failed channel change, but that is hard to detect.<br>
<br>
Maybe have it handle when the recording is significantly different in length than expected?<br>
in time and/or filesize. My recordings are always 1.1gig/hour, almost exactly, so if a file rings<br>
in at 800mb for an hour, something is wrong. Also, recording length. If the backend screws up,<br>
a half hour recording could start late or cut off early, making say a 17 minute file instead of 30.<br>
Those should be re-recorded, I would think.<br>
<br>
Another mistake that might be tough to find is a schedule discrepancy. This sunday, for example,<br>
the football game ran long and Family Guy failed to record (combined with my idea of "hey, I'll tell it not<br>
to record and instead just tune to it live and pause, and come back for it....only to find out that the next<br>
recording it tried to do bumped me out of live tv with no way to recover that buffer).<br>
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