The Spinning Wheel of Death

[Doubletop]

Not my term, that honor goes to Fluffdaddy, but it is apt.

There's a growing band of us out there reporting very sluggish responses with V6.1.9, see thread here. This results in the spinning wheel of death while SageTV tries to catch up with itself.

I've found that the way to stop this is remove the videos on menus option and then everything just flies along. You won't miss anything because while you are in the menus SageTV stops the playback and when you go back to your show it then resumes where you left off . I have no idea what the cause of problem is but maybe if we all report it then those nice guys at Sage may fix it.

However, I have noticed that, with the video on menus display disabled and when viewing SageTV recordings, mousing over the recordings, SageTV now displays the first frame of each of the recordings in the window where the video would have been, (If you ask me a pointless function unless the timing of your service provider is absolutely accurate otherwise you just get a picture of some spurious end of an advert or something). So, is that something to do with the problem as SageTV is doing something in the background it doesn't need to?

[mayamaniac]

The "video on menus" is probably VMR9 or Overlay related, depending on which setting you are using. If the menus are almost transparent, then its VMR9. If its fully opaque, then its overlay. These are video cards drivers or DirectX related, so the problem varies depending on your hardware. Although, in most cases, overlay works better than VMR9, while VMR9 looks better.

As for the video thumbnail generation introduced in v6, you can set the time frame of when it grabs the thumbnails by editing the sage.properties file. The default is 15 seconds into the video. Also, you can disable the thumbnails generation, I think it shows channel logo instead if you have them. I'm not sure what the properties are called but it might be in the manual or search for "thumbnails" in the sage.properties file.

[Doubletop]

I am using VMR9, I switched it to overlay and the responsiveness was marginally better when doing video on menus. but not that better that I'd want to leave it that way. BTW I only doing the window video not background full screen.

I switched off the video thumbnails but that didn't improve anything. (It does display the channel logos when the video thumbs are disabled.)

Other details Video card is GForce 6600GT, 2.4Ghz Pentium 1Gb Ram, 360Gb hard disk, Hauppage 350. Not top end but not under spec'd either.

[mayamaniac]

Is this happening on a separate client computer or on the client on the server computer itself? And are you running service mode? If yes, does it make a different if you disable service mode?

[CollinR]

Mine exhibits this occasionally as well.


This is watching the server on the server with it's local client only.

Oddly 3D on and VMR9 using all SageTV Decoders is thus far the most stable solution.

I am using Intel on-board video too, so it seems very odd to me that all the bells and whistles actually seems to work the best.