Recording Remnants on Skippa HDD

Started by ChrisW, September 25, 2017, 11:10:39 AM

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ChrisW

Hi.

While trying to diagnose a Skippa issue that has been happening for a few weeks (http://forum.icetv.com.au/iceforum/skippa/51/poor-remote-response/5758/), I started wondering if my Skippa's HDD was corrupted or fragmented. It now seems the above issue is server related, so I've put that matter on hold pending more info from the ICE team.

During my investigations of the HDD I viewed the Skippa's Video folder on my Win10 PC's Media Player.

I can see and play most of my recordings there, but in addition there are about 50 "RECxxxx.ts" files. These are playable (to a certain extent) and range in size from a few minutes to a few hours.

I also noticed that a few titles are NOT listed that do appear on, and play, on the Skippa. I'm assuming these will be in the "RECxxxx" files somewhere but the Skippa is picking up the correct title. There are also numerous recordings showing only on Media Player that have been watched and deleted in the past.

I say that these files play "to a certain extent", because on a few of them the first few minutes seem to play, but then lock up.

My Skippa has a habit of randomly rebooting every few days, so I suspect that the REC files are leftovers of the timeshift buffer at the time of a reboot.

In the hope that the Skippa will do some sort of disk check I've done numerous manual reboots via power toggling and the menu Restart option. I've also done a factory reset.

I have no Linux knowledge (which I believe is the Skippa's O/S), but my assumption is that the Linux equivalent of the file allocation table is corrupted. Or, a separate directory list maintained by the Skippa is corrupted.

So my questions are:

  • Are these random REC files necessary for normal Skippa operation? (e.g. ad-skipping info, playback position, etc)
  • Is there any way of tidying things up without losing the recordings I have?
  • If I do have to reformat, and so copy off my recordings first, can I do it in such a way that I can restore the files in original Skippa format to maintain ad-skip and subtitle details?
  • If I have to reformat, how do I do that? There does not seem to be a Skippa menu option to reformat the HDD.

Thanks in advance.

ChrisW

Bump - any thoughts on cleaning up my HDD files, please?

TimC

I'm no expert on HDDs, but your summation of the files make sense.

The Skippa does have a format function. 

Open My Week then step left and scroll down a couple of places you will find a screen showing the remaining file space.  There is a format option there.

I have a program on a disk someone gave me called Gparted (it's a free download from the web), that can be used to partition a disk in a number of different formats. I think its a Unix/Linix program so you have to boot it from the disk.

Can you delete the files?
Icebox, Fetch box (Not IceTV Capable)

ChrisW

Thanks Tim.

I looked through the Settings section, but it didn't occur to me that there was a format button on the remaining-space screen.

Once I've caught up on all my recordings I'll give it a go.

Chris