Tvheadend

I'm using TVHeadEnd on a TBS MOI+ - the TVHeadEnd version number is reported as "HTS Tvheadend 3.9.636~g03a69ff"

I have one annoying issue that I can't seem to resolve. I thought I had it fixed and then I made the mistake of connecting a new hard drive to the device (trying to get increased storage capacity for recordings) which turned out to be defective, and somehow it rendered the MOI+ in a state where it would not boot. So I had to do a "factory reset" which meant that I lost all my TVHeadEnd settings and had to start over. Not a big issue, just time consuming, however after the reset the issue I am about to describe shows up a lot more frequently, and I cannot understand why.

This system is used to receive DVB-S2 Free-To-Air satellite TV signals in North America. I should note, in case it is important, that almost none of the channels here send time information as part of their stream, therefore you cannot use the satellite signals to set the time of day. However it is possible to run ntpd as a service to keep the time fairly accurate. Before the crash, doing that seemed to resolve the issue I'm about to describe, but now it doesn't seem to help as much.

The basic problem is this: When I schedule a program for recording, after the recording is finished it may or may not contain bad timing information. The symptom of this is that when I go to play the recording in XBMC, it will display a running time that is inaccurate, sometimes wildly inaccurate. For example, on a half hour program, it may display a time of an hour, or an hour and a half, or in some cases around 25 hours! Or it may in fact display the correct running time, but then the following happens:

On such a recording, if I try to skip forward or backward (to skip a commercial or back up to see something I missed), one of two things will happen. One is that it will take a long time (several seconds) to seek to the desired position, but it will finally get there and stat playing again. The other, far more objectionable behavior is that it will simply stop playing the program altogether, either acting as if I'd pressed the "stop" button or simply returning to the start of the program and starting over. Note that when that happens, there is NO WAY to advance the recording back to where I was previously watching - the ONLY option is to start again from the beginning, and let it run (without attempting to change positions in the program) until it gets to the point where it was before. This is EXTREMELY annoying when it happens.

However, some programs seem to record just fine, and I can't figure out any reason some do and some don't. The bad recordings are not confined to any particular channel or program. The only observation I have made is that this almost never happens to a program recorded within the first hour after a reboot. However, for obvious reasons I don't want to have to reboot the system prior to ever program I want to record.

Before the crash, running ntpd as a service seemed to eliminate the problem, but after the factory reset and re-installation of the current firmware, the problem seems to be back and I would REALLY like to find a solution. I have tried not running ntpd at all (simply rebooting without doing any kind of time correction) and now even that doesn't appear to help, not that it would be a long term solution because without time correction this system loses about 20 seconds per day.

I'd really like to know WHY this happens and what can be done about it. Prior to running TVHeadEnd I was running MediaPortal and never saw this issue with recordings. MediaPortal had plenty of other issues, such as failing to record scheduled programs at all, but it never produced a recording with bad timing information such as this. So what does TVHeadEnd do that might cause this, and is there a way to fix it once and for all?