Specifying the Size of the Windows Media Center Live TV buffer.

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svet-am

Supreme [H]ardness
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One of my wife's bad habits is that she'll forget to stop playback when she's watching Live TV and she'll just shut off the TV.

Since all of our stations are HD, if she leaves it like this overnight it runs the main hard disk out of space and locks up the entire HTPC.

Is there a way to stop this behavior of Media Center? Ideally, I'd like the Live TV buffer to only be a certain (specified) size before it starts clobering over the beginning of the circular buffer. MythTV has a feature like this so I was hoping for something similar on Media Center.
 
I thought both buffers you are talking about were actually the same thing. I don't think my system stores or buffers any content past the pause buffer. If I watch a movie on live TV, and my pause buffer is set to 30 minutes, I can't go and rewind the movie and watch it again after I'm done, as only the last 30 minutes will have been cached. I can leave my TV on for hours and hours without filling up any disks. So I'm not exactly sure what is going on with your system. Are you sure you are simply watching live TV, or is it recording while watching?

I have a feeling it's recording instead of just playing live TV... maybe you can adjust "Recorder Storage" in the Task->TV->Recorder menu to at least stop locking it up on you. Also, appears to be user error involved. Have the person who is breaking your computer use it the right way, or else (ha!) It also sounds like you leave your PC on all the time. Maybe you should be putting it to sleep when not in use (and that will break off any recording or live TV buffer going on). If it is too hard to use two remotes or remember to turn off the PC (as apparently it is too hard to press stop), get a cheap Harmony universal remote, so pressing the off button will turn off all devices associated with the activity.

But really, it is not my experience that windows media center will simply fill up a hard drive from watching live TV (maybe recording, but not watching), so I think something else is going on here.
 
Pause buffer and live TV buffer are one in the same. The default buffer size(40 min) shouldn't even take up 10GB if you're filling up you're drive you should really think about getting a bigger one. I'd also suggest that you set up a single power button that toggles power for everything(it really depends on what equipment you have on what's the best route to go about doing this, if you happen to have a Mitsubishi TV w/ netcommand it's one of the best things I've seen for turning what should be on/off).

Here's were you can set the live TV buffer for 7MC:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\Video\Tuners\BackingStoreEachFileDurationSeconds
BackingStoreMaxExistingBackingFiles
BackingStoreMaxNumBackingFiles
 
The drive in question is 2TB. ~400GB of it is currently used so it should normally live with around 1.2TB free.

There's no way I'm going to be convinced that 40 minutes of HD recording takes up 1.2TB.

Also, I CANNOT turn this machine off. It is the media server for the entire house. It hosts content for all of our extenders (we have four), plus SAMBA shares for my Turtle Beach Audiotron, and some Linksys WMLS11B music players around the house.
 
Well then you're problem has nothing to do w/ the live TV buffer unless you changed it to to enough hours to file 1.2TB.

Take a look at your event logs to see if something in there is what's causing your real problem.
 
rhansen5_99 said:
Maybe this will help, http://www.hack7mc.com/2009/07/incr...-buffer-length-in-windows-7-media-center.html ?
Click to expand...

That's exactly what he said he wasn't referring too.

Honestly, I think your problem is something else. MC's Live TV doesn't continue to pool on the drive like that if all it's doing is watching Live TV. The buffer goes for only so long (like an hour) and then it clears and restarts. The only way it will do what you say it's doing is if she hits the record button and just lets it sit..... she can't possibly be stupid enough to be doing that, right?
 
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