[mythtv-users] Blank Zero Length Recording - Oh how I miss you.......

[Michael T. Dean]

On 03/26/2013 01:38 AM, boehm100 at comcast.net wrote:
> Yep I actually miss blank zero length recordings.  Why?  I new what they were.  They notified me when Comcast got frisky and suffles the channel line up for no apparent reason.  Now I get no notification other than my show go MISSING Missing missing.  I don't tend to monitor my up coming recordings close enough to notice things go missing until a quarter of the series has passes.  Major bummer!!
>
> Is there notification that I'm not seeing?  An email address field I forgot to enter?  Pop up warnings I disabled?
>

No, if you want notifications of events, you'll need to set up a script 
that checks whatever you want and run it using the MythTV System Events 
mechanism ( http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/MythTV_System_Events ).  If you 
create something others might find useful, feel free to post it at:  
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Category:Scripts and/or 
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Category:MythTV_System_Event_Scripts .

Basically, you'd want to write a script (ideally using the Python 
bindings, since they're complete and provide access to basically any 
information you'd need) that's run on a Recording started event and then 
checks to make sure that a file is created.  If it's not created by some 
timeout period, or if its size is deemed too small after some period, 
you can send an email to yourself.

You could, instead, use Gavin Hurlbut's find_zero_byte.pl script he made 
for the HD-PVR killer device as a basis.  The biggest problem with it is 
that it uses Perl, and the Perl bindings aren't nearly as complete or as 
high-level as the Python bindings.  See 
https://github.com/Beirdo/hdpvr-killer/blob/master/src/find-zero-byte.pl 
and https://github.com/Beirdo/hdpvr-killer/blob/master/src/README

Mike