[VU+ Uno4KSE] Crashing VU+Duo4KSE

[JerryK132]

What type of support thread are you creating?

Possible bug

What OpenViX Image build number are you using?

6.7.010

Have you tried re-flashing WITHOUT settings restore?

NO

Have you tried re-flashing WITH a settings restore?

YES

I've had the above unit for several years. I keep it up to date withe new images and updates. Pretty much from the start it has suffered from what appear to be two distinct forms of crash.

One is a 1-3 times/week crash while the machine in on standby. The only evidence is that the front panel clock stops. The panel usually responds to remote keys by flashing but no action. Switch off and on restores service - until next time. I've been unable to spot anything that might be a cause (eg recording start, internet issues, whatever).

The other type of crash is associated with recording and with timeshift especially. Crash usually happens when timeshift recording is ending and a recording is being finalised. In a variation on this theme, the unit also seems, over time (days), to display the vix spinner for a few seconds at odd times but I notice that the spins get longer and longer during which the remote control has no effect (although the keystroke seem to queue up till the spinner vanishes (which it does not always do!). This takes place over a period of minutes or hours after which it crashes. If I reboot, then the spinner generally stays hidden for a while after which the process eventually starts again. Accessing the drive (HDD) may well be related and it behaves a bit as though something is filling up and then cauing a crash. I have TBs of space on my HDD and maximum space allocated to logs. Debug logs=off. Plenty of flash space too.

A couple of months or so ago - possibly the penultimate or last update of vix 6.6 was implemented and crashes all but disappeared! great celebrations and the crashes did not initially reappear with 6.7, but after another update or two, crashes started happening again - especially but not only when recording!

I tried restoring old images and backups but was unable to improve matters. So now I'm up to date with 6.7.010 and crashing is worse, especially when recording.

I believe I once tried disabling timeshift which I think improved matters, but I use timeshift frequently so I haven't really followed this up. Please help!

I have two dual tuners - 1 sat 1 terrestrial

Thank you.

 

[Huevos]

Are you using LCD4Linex plugin? If so please remove and try again.

The box becoming unresponsive sounds like it has a leak and runs out of resources.

Without you providing logs it will be impossible to pinpoint the problems, so you need to upload them.

 

[JerryK132]

Are you using LCD4Linex plugin? If so please remove and try again.

The box becoming unresponsive sounds like it has a leak and runs out of resources.

Without you providing logs it will be impossible to pinpoint the problems, so you need to upload them.

Thank you.
No user plugins. Just the 6 that I think have always been there:
EPG Importer
IMDB Setup
Media Scanner
OpenWebIf
Picture Player
Transcoding Setup

Yes, it definitely feels like some kind of resource fade.

Debug is off since the last crash today. So I attach a couple of debug logs from yesterday. There are no Crash logs visible...
Hopefully that will do the trick.

 

[twol]

The logs are a mess, with endless unable to find messages, lasting several seconds
Also do you have kodi installed, if not are you using the web interface to start a Kodi bouquet service or ? See below.

09:02:59.6571 "::ffff:192.168.50.113" - - [30/May/2025:08:02:58 +0000] "GET /web/getservices?sRef=1%3A7%3A1%3A0%3A0%3A0%3A0%3A0%3A0%3A0%3AFROM%20BOUQUET%20%22userbouquet%2Efavourites%2Etv%22%20ORDER%20BY%20bouquet HTTP/1.1" 200 3307 "-" "Kodi/21.2 (Linux; Android 9.0; AFTKA Build/PS7697.4800N) Android TV/9.0.0 Sys_CPU/armv7l App_Bitness/32 Version/21.2-(21.2.0)-Git:20250115-d1a1d48c3c"
09:02:59.6833 "::ffff:192.168.50.113" - - [30/May/2025:08:02:58 +0000] "GET /web/getservices?sRef=1%3A7%3A1%3A0%3A0%3A0%3A0%3A0%3A0%3A0%3AFROM%20BOUQUET%20%22userbouquet%2EFranceTV%2Etv%22%20ORDER%20BY%20bouquet HTTP/1.1" 200 4259 "-" "Kodi/21.2 (Linux; Android 9.0; AFTKA Build/PS7697.4800N) Android TV/9.0.0 Sys_CPU/armv7l App_Bitness/32 Version/21.2-(21.2.0)-Git:20250115-d1a1d48c3c"

With epgimport you seem to be importing unnecessary (unknown) entries - so what are you importing and why?

To be honest, I would be tempted to setup the box completely from scratch, re- scanning your Sat and T2 tuners and including a reset of your UK and French bouquets, and as you can multiboot on this box, do it from a new multiboot slot so you don’t lose your current setup (for now)

 

[JerryK132]

Thanks. Yes I use Kodi throughout the house with Amazon Firesticks to distribute TV etc to TVs and a monitor. It works ok although sound sometimes leads the video by some 5sec!

I've not really done much configuration on Kodi, at either end. Kodi installed its own player/driver and apart from being slow to start, is the only way I found of distributing stuff round the home. Having said that I mainly watch through the directly connected (to VU+) TV.

I am not really familiar with the operation and sourcing of EPGs so all is enabled just in case (Except OpenTV, I think). I do have a weird EPG problem on one French Terrestrial channel (TF1-Series Chan 46) only in which the EPG simply does not align with the programs and occasionally leaves one or two out completely! Very odd, but I digress (unless this symptom is useful for your diagnostic).

I set up the bouquets using the remote and the somewhat clumsy UI associated with that. So I'm not keen to start again, but I gather from the Forum that there are other mechanisms to do this which might be more straightforward... @abu baniaz mentioned elsewhere: ABM plugin, Owif bouquet editor, Channel editor on PC. Not sure how to access these but I will have a look. What PC-based prog would do this?

I know I do enable a lot of stuff I'm unlikely to use just in case - weird Asian/ME channels, etc. I could be more selective but does it matter?

Also, what about the crashes? I appreciate that a complete rebuild might just fix it, but can we identify the problem? What do you think might be causing them? No crashes today so far...
--------------
Oops. Looks like I lied! Switched system on just now and an error popped up instead of normal prog. Error img attached. Just switched on debug logs again. Also 3 crash logs appeared this morning at about 9. That is when I record two news progs (9-10am) on Sundays. One was recorded 3 times (with 3 PVR entries 62,0,blank mins), the other not recorded at all! Crash logs attached too. A fourth crash log has just appeared! But all Crash logs 0-length! Attached in case timings (names) are relevant.

Hope this helps.
Thanks

Couple of extraa points.
My HDD is set to "Standby after 10 mins" seemed a good idea at the time (after previous HDD died).
For a while I has a Synology NAS attached as HDD - but NAS not connected at present.. Gave up, thinking this might be too slow and causing the crashes. WebIf now still shows:

enigma2hddTHEBOX:

SMBv2.0 using autofs: //192.168.50.200/media/hdd (192.168.50.200)

 

[twol]

So you have the Kodi plugin installed??
Debug logs don,t show crashes. - So you need to post crash logs
attached picture shows out of space (OSE error)

having unneeded Bouquet entries (filling up flash memory) and causing many seconds of error messages is not a good idea.

 

[JerryK132]

So you have the Kodi plugin installed??
Debug logs don,t show crashes. - So you need to post crash logs
attached picture shows out of space (OSE error)

having unneeded Bouquet entries (filling up flash memory) and causing many seconds of error messages is not a good idea.

I don't use Kodi on the VU+ box & main TV - I use the vix UI, so I guess i don't need the Kodi plugin for local use. If there is one, where would I find it? I've listed the user plugins (from the MainMenu/Plugins) and there are no other plugins AFAICS. Am I missing something?

I attach the About and Memory pages - memory is indeed very low. Never seen it so low. Seems excessive to me. Any places I should look? My EPG.dat is about 7MB (in etc/enigma2). Is that a lot? Where are all the errors coming from? How can I stop them without starting from scratch?

Btw, my images and backups are all on HDD not flash.

I have a number of bouquets. One is called Last Scanned with some 300 channels I almost never use and which appear on the EPG. I also have a BSkyB bouquet and a FreeSat bouquet - both of which are fully populated in the EPG (numbers reach 4 digits!). I could do without most of them as I only look occasionally for channels outside my favourites. But they are a nice to have. If the channels were listed mostly without EPG listings, that would be fine for me. Can I list channels on the epg pages without updatting the epg daily data?

Many thanks for your help!

 

[abu baniaz]

Please don't mix up EPG and bouquets (favourites/groups of channels). Mixing up the two will not help you in learning to get to grips with your receiver. The two are different. You can obtain EPG as often as you want , it won't affect your bouquets. You only need to modify your bouquets when a channel in it changes frequency and no longer works, you want to modify content/order of it. If you are using AutoBouquetsMaker, you could use a favourites.xml file so it creates a bouquet with the channels you want.

Best to store EPG on your HDD/USB as opposed to internal flash memory ( etc/Enigma2)

The last scanned bouquet is dynamic. You really shouldn't be relying on it.

There is a thread in the guide section about EPG and bouquets. As an aside, my signature has a link to a thread on taking screenshots. Better than taking photos. I'll probably edit post later to include link.

 

[JerryK132]

Please don't mix up EPG and bouquets (favourites/groups of channels). Mixing up the two will not help you in learning to get to grips with your receiver. The two are different. You can obtain EPG as often as you want , it won't affect your bouquets. You only need to modify your bouquets when a channel in it changes frequency and no longer works, you want to modify content/order of it. If you are using AutoBouquetsMaker, you could use a favourites.xml file so it creates a bouquet with the channels you want.

Best to store EPG on your HDD/USB as opposed to internal flash memory ( etc/Enigma2)

The last scanned bouquet is dynamic. You really shouldn't be relying on it.

There is a thread in the guide section about EPG and bouquets. As an aside, my signature has a link to a thread on taking screenshots. Better than taking photos. I'll probably edit post later to include link.

Many thanks.
I've changed the location of epg.dat and deleted the old one.
I found the guide - It was helpful and I'm clear about the difference between epg and bouquets. But I can't see how I prevent the epgImport from populating all the bouquets - Last scanned, sky uk, freesat uk. As I understand it these should not be EPG populated, but how do I control that? It seems all or nothing is imported.

In EPGImport what sources should I use? I've been experimenting with Rytec but cannot work out which ones to use. I discovered there are import logs which show many "unknown channels". I tried Clear and "Import current source" to try to identify channels being imported, but the Clear (red) function does not seem to work.

Should i be using OpenTV EPG Downloader? Currently disabled, but surprisingly I just received a notification that it was about to run Open TV Zap.

What is the setting: Load EPG only services in bouquets?

Apologies for the many questions...

 

[abu baniaz]

EPGImpoorter plugin does not populate any bouquets. It just downloads EPG from the internet. In Enigma2, channels are identified by service reference. When you obtain EPG, any channels with the linked service reference will show that EPG. It doesn't matter which bouquets they are in or even if they are not in a bouquet.

If you are a UK user and want to use EPGImpoorter, enable the News, and all the four UK entries. (Might be three). Don't worry about unknown channels in log. Some UK channels are broadcast in other countries (cable and satellite), you won't have those service references on your system if you just have 28.2. Sometimes a channel stops broadcasting and the Rytec team aren't informed, so that channel will remain unknown. It's not an issue to be concerned about.

With regards to the question about Load only in bouquets, if you enable it, EPGImporter will only add EPG for channels that are in a bouquet. Most people scan the satellite they want and only add their favourite channels to bouquets. Although ABM and other such plugins have changed things. Best to leave that option at the default.

Best to use only one source of EPG as they end up clashing/overriding each other. The internet based one will have more details like cast, year etc. So choose one you want to use and stick to it. There are even differences between Freesat and Sky's OpenTV EPG. I don't use EPG importer for the main receiver, I do for the one my daughter uses though.

For most UK users using 28.2 only, the OpenTV EPG zapper is sufficient. However, best to ensure that the channel it zaps to is in a bouquet.

 

[twol]

I don't use Kodi on the VU+ box & main TV - I use the vix UI, so I guess i don't need the Kodi plugin for local use. If there is one, where would I find it? I've listed the user plugins (from the MainMenu/Plugins) and there are no other plugins AFAICS. Am I missing something?

I attach the About and Memory pages - memory is indeed very low. Never seen it so low. Seems excessive to me. Any places I should look? My EPG.dat is about 7MB (in etc/enigma2). Is that a lot? Where are all the errors coming from? How can I stop them without starting from scratch?

Btw, my images and backups are all on HDD not flash.

I have a number of bouquets. One is called Last Scanned with some 300 channels I almost never use and which appear on the EPG. I also have a BSkyB bouquet and a FreeSat bouquet - both of which are fully populated in the EPG (numbers reach 4 digits!). I could do without most of them as I only look occasionally for channels outside my favourites. But they are a nice to have. If the channels were listed mostly without EPG listings, that would be fine for me. Can I list channels on the epg pages without updatting the epg daily data?

Many thanks for your help!

That memory figure is really at critical - which is why I would suggest setting up a new image and starting anew using AutoBouquetManager (ABM) to setup your bouquets after a rescan of the tuners (Ask Abu if you need advice on ABM).
If you have installed the Multiboot feature then this is easy to do without impacting the current setup.

I usually run ABM once and then usually use a Bouquet Editor e.g. Echannelizer to sequence/Edit what I want but as Abu has said you can create a user setup.
The attachment is from my Vu+ Uno4KSE and you can see the difference and I have many more plugins installed from the feeds plus UK & German Bouquets plus IPTV.
I use EPGimport for both UK & German services plus IPTV - selecting only the countries I use. Works for me.

Kodi plugin takes up memory which is why I asked if you have installed the plugin.

 

[JerryK132]

Thanks both.

I see from Twol's screenshot that my memory situation is far worse than I imagined! I've just done an image backup which took over 45mins! Size=2.8GB! Prev img size (same vix version)= 150MB...

I realise now from Abu's comments that I should not have the two (Sky & Freesat) bouquets at all. They will only contain roughly the same as each other, all of which will presumably be in LastScanned as well. So I should be using last scanned to pick n mix into Favourites and any other bouquets I might create with ABM.

I may now try a new image on my multi-boot. I'm not keen, as I have tweaked so many minor settings over the years on the existing image and which I would lose. But clearly my system is ailing. I'll try the earlier backup first (also 6.7.010) and remove the pointless bouquets to see what happens. I'll also re-tweak the Rytec sources, although this I gather is not an issue. I'll also stick with EPG-Importer - as I like the casts, etc info Abu mentioned.

Meanwhile it crashed this morning around 7.40 - no new logs at all. So I set up a timeshift recording which produced 2 files a 46 min file and a 4 min file for the programme in question - should they not be combined into one? The good news (!) is that it crashed at some point and actually produced a 53KB crash file which I attach. Can you have a look at that and let me know if it sheds any new light on my situation.

Thanks again.

 

[twol]

Thanks both.

I see from Twol's screenshot that my memory situation is far worse than I imagined! I've just done an image backup which took over 45mins! Size=2.8GB! Prev img size (same vix version)= 150MB...

I realise now from Abu's comments that I should not have the two (Sky & Freesat) bouquets at all. They will only contain roughly the same as each other, all of which will presumably be in LastScanned as well. So I should be using last scanned to pick n mix into Favourites and any other bouquets I might create with ABM.

I may now try a new image on my multi-boot. I'm not keen, as I have tweaked so many minor settings over the years on the existing image and which I would lose. But clearly my system is ailing. I'll try the earlier backup first (also 6.7.010) and remove the pointless bouquets to see what happens. I'll also re-tweak the Rytec sources, although this I gather is not an issue. I'll also stick with EPG-Importer - as I like the casts, etc info Abu mentioned.

Meanwhile it crashed this morning around 7.40 - no new logs at all. So I set up a timeshift recording which produced 2 files a 46 min file and a 4 min file for the programme in question - should they not be combined into one? The good news (!) is that it crashed at some point and actually produced a 53KB crash file which I attach. Can you have a look at that and let me know if it sheds any new light on my situation.

Thanks again.

can you do me a favour ---- whats in Menu/Information/Devices ? and if you press Blue button/ViX/Mount Manager ... what do you see there??? What is mounted as /media/hdd... if anything??

If you are using Web interface then Remote/Information/receiver and right click & take screenshot - post here

 

[JerryK132]

can you do me a favour ---- whats in Menu/Information/Devices ? and if you press Blue button/ViX/Mount Manager ... what do you see there??? What is mounted as /media/hdd... if anything??

If you are using Web interface then Remote/Information/receiver and right click & take screenshot - post here

Done...

 

[JerryK132]

Done...

Btw, I did mention the HDD is set to standby after 10 mins. Seems silly to leave it spinning for days when not in use. But I often wondered if that could cause problems - delayed startup on record - that sort of thing... I see that the crash log has some what look like HDD errs to me... I've long suspected disk problems - a previous HDD died. Current one is more appropriate model... And why is timeshift usually involved when it crashes?
Just a thought!

 

[twol]

Done...

OK, thanks for doing that. WithTimeshift that file should be there, but obviously isn,t which is why I was wondering if it was recording to flash.
I would love to get my hands on the box, because in my view, there is something basically incorrect in the setup,
So basically do a settings backup and then flash a new image to a new slot, so you can keep using the current one in the meantime, by using long press power, choose multibootselector and flip between images….Don,t restore settings, but setup the new image with basic requirements…..and move forward adding features/bouquets - perhaps use ABM to create initial bouquets and see how that works.
You can always recover from the settings backup if necessary.
As a matter of interest what is the size of your /etc/enigma2 folder?

 

[JerryK132]

OK, thanks for doing that. WithTimeshift that file should be there, but obviously isn,t which is why I was wondering if it was recording to flash.
I would love to get my hands on the box, because in my view, there is something basically incorrect in the setup,
So basically do a settings backup and then flash a new image to a new slot, so you can keep using the current one in the meantime, by using long press power, choose multibootselector and flip between images….Don,t restore settings, but setup the new image with basic requirements…..and move forward adding features/bouquets - perhaps use ABM to create initial bouquets and see how that works.
You can always recover from the settings backup if necessary.
As a matter of interest what is the size of your /etc/enigma2 folder?

Thanks. I'm also extremely curious to understand what is wrong! How on earth does my last image backup reach almost 3GB?? Maybe not compressed?

Both timeshift recordings are in HDD/Movie. The large one is a .ts file but the small one is a .ts.sc file which may imply that the final closing of the 4 min file was at the time of the crash? The HDD/timeshift folder still has 11 GB of buffer files! Sounds anomalous. Probably I should delete the lot? Or disable and re-enable Timeshift?

Curiously the /etc/enigma2 folder holds less than 500 KB! I had concluded that that was the flash area, but the size is too small... So where is the damn flash image?

Other point... When back in the day I set up the NAS box I called it HDD. When crashing started and I removed the NAS I think I initially named the HD using one of the other available names - SDA SBC USB or whatever. Then, thinking that it was safer to revert to standard names once I removed the NAS so I renamed/mounted the HD as HDD. Not being a Linuxoid (at least since UNIX in 1977), I was a little out of my depth assigning devices. But I used to write device drivers in asm back in the day so I felt confident enough to guess... So maybe there is some residual path data table which is screwing things up. I realise this is a bit of flogging the proverbial dead horse, and I appreciate your help hugely, it's just that I'd really like to find the problem because it's there! Feel free to tell me to rebuild (again!).

Am I right to assume that the files in HDD/backup are settings only or do they contain incremental backup bits as well? It's just that if I load a backup it asks if I want to restore settings, when the answer is obviously yes if that is the sole purpose of the file If the message was confirm load or similar, it would be clearer...

Thanks

 

[Willo3092]

Am I right to assume that the files in HDD/backup are settings only or do they contain incremental backup bits as well? It's just that if I load a backup it asks if I want to restore settings, when the answer is obviously yes if that is the sole purpose of the file If the message was confirm load or similar, it would be clearer...

Thanks

The backup also has a list of installed plugins. You can restore settings but not plugins or plugins without settings.

 

[abu baniaz]

For clarity, I said you should not have two sources of EPG. I did not say anything about not having Freesat and Sky bouquets. Bouquets and EPG are different things! However, this is not relevant to your timeshift crash.

The code was previously so that you could have one device for timeshift and another for recordings. As an example a USB stick for timeshift and a mechanical HDD for recordings. This could still be possible.

 

[twol]

?

The backup also has a list of installed plugins. You can restore settings but not plugins or plugins without settings.

? Maybe its my version of backupmanager but I restored just plugins last night because of an issue