Playback of file currently being modified by another process

[mfc_guy]

My question is about streaming/playing an .mpg file which is currently being written to by another process (Gbpvr).

I am recording a live television signal using a Hauppauge PVR-150. This creates an mpeg-2 file which is directly playable by the PS3 without transcoding. I have shared the directory that the file is in using PS3 media server, and the file shows up on the XMB as expected (and is also playable).

The issue is that once the user has browsed to the file on the XMB, the length of the media reported by the PS3 (in minutes and seconds) seems to be fixed, even though the length of the actual file is growing as it is written to by the PVR-150. Unfortunately what this means is that the PS3 will only play the file up to the amount of time that was originally reported. This is a problem when it comes to watching for instance; time-shifted television, whereby you expect to start watching after the show has started but before it has finished being broadcast.

I have reviewed most of the posts in the forum to date and this issue seems to be related to (but not identical to) one by kuszner title: PSM restart button. I have observed that if I actually shut down and restart the PS3 media server on my computer, then the new (correct) length of the file will be reported by the PS3 after browsing to the file again on the XMB. Naturally this is somewhat undesirable especially if there is an easy fix which I have overlooked.

For the record, I am using PMS Version 1.03 on what is otherwise known as 'the ancient hardware': Athlon 1.0 Ghz, Win2K. Otherwise, the PS3 Media server is working very well on this box, especially considering I am specifically NOT trying to transcode anything on the fly. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated ! Thank-you for the very useful (and lightweight) software !!

[shagrath]

hard to solve
that means the soft would have to reparse every file at every moment to see if length has changed and send a modified new file info... that would make the software somewhat...bloated
I'd rather implement a restart action on the #video Settings# virtual menu on XMB

[mfc_guy]

I agree. Another possibility (besides the restart) that I was thinking about is a user-configurable timeout in the software that would force a refresh/update of the files. Even something relatively slow, like once per minute would help considerably.