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Skippa behaviour has also returned to normal.

Thanks Daniel.

After a night's viewing, all back to normal.

Thanks Daniel.

Thanks Daniel.

Will let you know the result from tonight's viewing.

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.

I'm having exactly the same problem, starting about 2-3 weeks ago, as I reported in the thread mentioned above.

I have a backup Skippa for if/when the current one dies. To try and diagnose a hardware fault I tried an alternate power supply, and also swapped over the HDD to the backup.

The problem remained, so by my reckoning that rules out the Skippa hardware.

That just leaves internet/network and failing HDD, the latter of which I suspected the most. I was even making plans on how to copy off the recordings and reformat the disk, which I REALLY didn't want to have to do.

Seeing as yours is the third such Skippa report I'm now satisfied it is an ICETv server issue so I'll stop worrying, and hope for a solution by the ICE team.

I am definitely seeing instances where the server can take up to a maximum of 30 seconds to respond to a request (which is the max, and the minimum is only 124ms), the average being 8.99 seconds, and with the Beyonwiz timeout set to 10 seconds once it gets above that we get an issue.

Thanks for that.

Do you know if the Skippa constantly polls the server, or just every 5 minutes for data updates?

As advised, I've been having this loss of response constantly for the last week or two, and its appears more so during ad-skip processing or recording.

I'll try the factory reset this weekend, but if that doesn't help I'm considering swapping out the HDD to my backup Skippa (yes, lucky me  :) ) to try and troubleshoot.

Before I go to all that trouble: DANIEL - did anything come from the possibly-suspect log activity which may indicate an intermittent server issue?

I'm not sure if this is related, but my Skippa has been driving me crazy for the last week, where it becomes unresponsive to the remote for about 5-10 seconds every 30-60 seconds.

I normally have only seen such behaviour when there has been internet connection or IceTV server issues.

I've been suspecting things like HDD fragmentation, dying power supply, hardware, etc. There have been a few times I've wondered if it was Ice server related.

Any other Skippa users experiencing this behaviour recently?
Does ad-skip processing rely on recurring server/internet access, as it seems to be worse during such times.

Confirmed working ok now, thanks.

Tonight's Archer on ABC is listed as a repeat.

As far as I'm aware we are in the middle of a new series for Australia - broadcast almost exactly a year ago overseas.

I concur, but I only see it on my iPad in landscape mode.

In portrait mode it is fine, but with a blank line between each show you actually see less info on the long screen than you do on a short screen! Bit silly, and a waste, IMO.

Thanks Daniel.

As with the others, all is back to normal for me as well.

Thanks Dan.

Will check it out when I get home.

Just out of technical interest, are you prepared to share what the problem was?
(I know companies don't like to "air their dirty laundry", but we are all friends/family here.  :) )

I've been manually adding timers directly from the Skippa EPG and they have been working ok.

I take that back - my Skippa also rebooted itself and all the manual timers were gone.

I've been manually adding timers directly from the Skippa EPG and they have been working ok.