Experts please help me buy STV - general and tech questions follow

[totalgeek]

I just trialed BeyondTV and SageTV I must say that I'm looking forward to buying STV. The picutre quality is better. I tried doing DirectX in BeyondTV and it kept stuttering. I'm doing VMR9 with the purevideo (trial) in STV and it works flawelessly. Its great also with everything integrated into STV as opposed to using two different applications BM and BTV. I like STV a lot and to be frank I'm just waiting for my paycheck to come in. I tried BTV, Meedio, and even MythTV, and by far the easiest to setup and get running is STV and picture quality can't be beat.

Only a couple of questions:

1. Every so often the client freezes on me with STV. I have this box dedicated as my TIVO replacement the only thing running is my STV application. Sometimes when watching it just freezes and nothing but a soft reboot helps to resolve it. Does this happen often to others? I shut down unnecessary resources and everything on my Win XP install. This maybe a deal stopper for me if it happens all the time. I just want this to stay up and running like my Tivo did. My system specs are iDeq 210v VIA 400, Athlon XP 2400, 512M Ram, 160Gig HD, GeForce 5500 AGP, and WinTV USB PVR2

2. Defrag I did a search on this and it brought up a lot threads. If I go with a 64K cluster do I have to defrag? I just got a 300 Gig HD replacement so I'm going to do a replacement.

3. ShowAnalyzer is great! Except I have on channel with some bits of static. This is causing everything recorded not to have any commercials, this is Cartoon network and my favs Futurama & Family Guy. I already checked the cable and whats odd is its screwed in all the way and there is static (wavy lines) but when I plug it into the tv straight it works fine with no static eh...

4. Stability - Is this a stable platform? Like I said I want this to run 24/7 can I really rely on WinXP Home and STV to give me this?

TIA to any advice and so far great product! It has totally delivered on my SUPER PVR dream.

[DIBU]

Originally Posted by totalgeek

I just trialed BeyondTV and SageTV I must say that I'm looking forward to buying STV. The picutre quality is better. I tried doing DirectX in BeyondTV and it kept stuttering. I'm doing VMR9 with the purevideo (trial) in STV and it works flawelessly. Its great also with everything integrated into STV as opposed to using two different applications BM and BTV. I like STV a lot and to be frank I'm just waiting for my paycheck to come in. I tried BTV, Meedio, and even MythTV, and by far the easiest to setup and get running is STV and picture quality can't be beat.

Only a couple of questions:

1. Every so often the client freezes on me with STV. I have this box dedicated as my TIVO replacement the only thing running is my STV application. Sometimes when watching it just freezes and nothing but a soft reboot helps to resolve it. Does this happen often to others? I shut down unnecessary resources and everything on my Win XP install. This maybe a deal stopper for me if it happens all the time. I just want this to stay up and running like my Tivo did. My system specs are iDeq 210v VIA 400, Athlon XP 2400, 512M Ram, 160Gig HD, GeForce 5500 AGP, and WinTV USB PVR2

2. Defrag I did a search on this and it brought up a lot threads. If I go with a 64K cluster do I have to defrag? I just got a 300 Gig HD replacement so I'm going to do a replacement.

3. ShowAnalyzer is great! Except I have on channel with some bits of static. This is causing everything recorded not to have any commercials, this is Cartoon network and my favs Futurama & Family Guy. I already checked the cable and whats odd is its screwed in all the way and there is static (wavy lines) but when I plug it into the tv straight it works fine with no static eh...

4. Stability - Is this a stable platform? Like I said I want this to run 24/7 can I really rely on WinXP Home and STV to give me this?

TIA to any advice and so far great product! It has totally delivered on my SUPER PVR dream.

hi
2. i have more als one terra hd's. i have never defrag this 64k cluster hd's and no problem with playing shows.

4. my server runs also 24/7. only restart the server when it is micros##ft patchday.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by totalgeek

1. Every so often the client freezes on me with STV.

I don't have a definite answer, but some things to try would be to make sure the video drivers are up to date and try either the latest java, or the one that comes with the SageTV installation. See this post for more java comments.

Is this just a client, or is this where recordings are created? VIA chipsets can be a pain with some Hauppauge cards (and other devices), but I don't know if it would be a problem with a PVR-USB2.

2. Defrag I did a search on this and it brought up a lot threads. If I go with a 64K cluster do I have to defrag? I just got a 300 Gig HD replacement so I'm going to do a replacement.

I don't ever bother defragging my 64K cluster size partitions & have no stuttering.

4. Stability - Is this a stable platform? Like I said I want this to run 24/7 can I really rely on WinXP Home and STV to give me this?

It is for a lot of people. In the PC world, there will always be some hardware issues (VIA chipsets for one, as mentioned by a lot of people on this forum), but like DIBU said: I only reboot if I have some OS or utility updates to install... and I usually wait months before doing those things.

- Andy

[spike5884]

Originally Posted by totalgeek

2. Defrag I did a search on this and it brought up a lot threads. If I go with a 64K cluster do I have to defrag? I just got a 300 Gig HD replacement so I'm going to do a replacement.

Don't replace your current HD. Add the 300GB on. Keep the OS and programs on your original HD and keep the cluster size small. Have SageTV record to the new 300 GB set at 64K clusters.

[mightyt]

Chiming in ... I have recently had a boat load of stability problems. However, As Andy stated, they may very well be attributed to my cheap ECS Motherboard, read VIA chipset. I found problems with a SB sound card, one of my older Hauppauge 250's didn't work, my USB2-PVR didn't work and it continually locked up when recordingfrom the 250's that did work! I tried everything using the wisdom and advice from those on this forum, but have finally been convinced it's not the OS, Drivers or Sage and must be hardware, at least I sure hope so since I just bought a new ASUS Motherboard with an Intel chipset. I am hoping it is not other hardware, but feel that the pattern of hardware component problems lead me to the common motherboard and can't all be bad.

So, if you have stability problems ... they may or may be VIA and not really Sage in and of itself ...

T.

[rp1790]

As far as stability goes, that is something I have been struggling with and have found the solution. I hade the 1.4x and 1.5.6 versions of Java installed, once I uninstalled both of them and only re-installed the one that comes with Sage (1.4x) I am now back to a very stable state.

For me Java 1.5.6 caused many problems. For the soft reboots, do you have FSE truned on? That is known to be a little picky, turning it off might help if it's on.

[totalgeek]

Thanks guys!

This was also a way for me to test the "community" aspect of STV and it passes with flying colors. What a helpful and *friendly* community. No one here has once said "search more you'll find your answer".

I hope its not the motherboard as its built into the case Its a miniPC case that I bought just for my HTPC look. I'm leaning towards the VIA problem as a lot of people from the MythTV world said that VIA is unstable. Also I wish I could just put the new hard drive in this case but there is no room for it the Biostar iDeq 210v is a really small case built for only 1 drive from what I can see.

Latest drivers, DirectX and Java are installed on the computer running as my HTPC. I'm sorry if I caused confusion this HTPC is running the frontend and STV as a service using the Hauppage 45-button remote with the SendMsg IRemote.ini text file I found on these forums and also the webserver addition for scheduling recordings while I'm at work

[davin]

If you're running server and client on the same machine, try turning off the service... disable the service, run SageTV, and just leave it open at all times (you can put it to sleep when you're not watching shows). Some people have had stability issues when running in service mode... it's worth a shot to see if it stops your intermittent freezes.

[totalgeek]

ah just reread the messages and rp1790 mentioned FSE. I *do* have that enabled I'm going to try disable that to see what happens.

@davin is this a better "way" of doing STV? The reason I ask is if something happens like the client freezes at least the service continues to record. Is there that type of reliability if I just run it as one all encompassing application? But I'll try it after I disable FSE and see if that fixes my problem.

I'll also try downgrading my version of Java I didn't know that STV came with a JAVA install. I just downloaded the latest SDK from Java's website.

[stevech]

If it's any reassurance, my SageTV server is an AMD2400 on a cheap ECS motherboard (pre DDR memory), USB Hauppauge, and I added two cheap USB 2 PCI bus cards. AGP graphics card (ATI). One USB card (4 port) has ONLY the Hauppauge on it. The other has a USB '11g $20 WiFi dongle on an 8 ft cable (elevated); that's my LAN connection. 2nd IDE drive and one USB connected IDE drive in a box, for video recordings.

No stability problems at all. I run generic SageTV, no mods. No other apps on the PC except a VNC server so I can fiddle with it remotely.

I began with a blank boot disk, installed XP Pro SP2 and all patches before loading SageTV. This probably helped.

I also set the RAM speed options in the BIOS one notch down from max to accomodate my cheap on-sale RAM (512M) on one stick, from Circuit City (name brand though). I got crashes right after Windows launches if I pushed that RAM's speed.

[rp1790]

Originally Posted by totalgeek

ah just reread the messages and rp1790 mentioned FSE. I *do* have that enabled I'm going to try disable that to see what happens.

I'll also try downgrading my version of Java I didn't know that STV came with a JAVA install. I just downloaded the latest SDK from Java's website.

You can download the older version of Java at http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/download.html.