Stuttering on Recorder Videos

[kirkb]

OK, this is wierd. I get really stable live HD playback. Tiz great actually. I'm have a gf 7600gs, purevideo codec (icon shows when playing video), sagetv6.3.5.

With recorded shows, I get really great playback too. However, at some point .... 5 mins in .... 30 mins in the audio and video start stuttering real bad and everything goes in slow motion like someone is hitting pause/play over and over.

If I hit pause, rewind, play it will usually get back on track. Sometimes it has the same issue in the same spot and sometimes it starts playing again just fine. I've tried different audio codecs with no success. Like I said, this only appears to happen with recorded video and doesn't consistantly happen in the same place.

Any advice? This is my new HD server setup. I currently have an SD only server running solid. The wife wont let me put it in production until I solve this problem

Thanks, Kirk

[Opus4]

Well, my basic question for stuttering is: are the recording drives using 64K clusters? And, I suppose: is the drive working in its fastest mode?

- Andy

[kirkb]

Yup, my old server was 16k and worked fine oddly. This is a new SATA drive 64kb blocks and the sata controller is configured correctly.

[bbig119]

Originally Posted by kirkb

OK, this is wierd. I get really stable live HD playback. Tiz great actually. I'm have a gf 7600gs, purevideo codec (icon shows when playing video), sagetv6.3.5.

With recorded shows, I get really great playback too. However, at some point .... 5 mins in .... 30 mins in the audio and video start stuttering real bad and everything goes in slow motion like someone is hitting pause/play over and over.

If I hit pause, rewind, play it will usually get back on track. Sometimes it has the same issue in the same spot and sometimes it starts playing again just fine. I've tried different audio codecs with no success. Like I said, this only appears to happen with recorded video and doesn't consistantly happen in the same place.

Any advice? This is my new HD server setup. I currently have an SD only server running solid. The wife wont let me put it in production until I solve this problem

Thanks, Kirk

Same problem here. What happens when you playback HD recordings in another player like VLC? Can you test what happens if you have SPDIF selected? Are you using Vista or XP?

[lovingHDTV]

I had this exact problem recently. There are a couple things you can look at.

1. Is sage doing something else in the background like checking import libraries, etc. For me the sage server was banging hard on the hdd, if I rebooted the server it would stop and everything would play great.
2. Do you record to .ts or .mpg files? I also had an issue where Sage would hit the hdd trying to create the thumbnail for the show and this caused issues also. I changed back to .mpg (the default I believe) as I did not have issues prior to changing to .ts.

I filed a bug with SageTV on this and they pointed me to turning off periodic library imports, but I don't think this was the issue as it had always been on and I never had an issue previously. However, I when I changed back to .mpg files all the stuttering went away.

hth,

[bbig119]

Good ideas and I'll check into this when I get home. Do you think that those things would also affect and cause the same problems when these files are played in Zoomplayer or VLC?

[lovingHDTV]

for me they did. It was an issue of servering the files off the SageTV server for me. Not anything todo with the files themselves.

[enthilzha]

I had a smiliar issue with video stuttering on my Sage Client box (Core2Duo E6750, XP SP2 connected to my server with 750GB 64K cluster drive). I ended up tracing it down to my client box's AV Firewall (Trendmicro in my case). The software firewall was trying to statefully inspect the streamed video from my server and while it wasn't pegging the CPU, the added latency was enough to make my video playback choppy. Adding a permit any/any rule between the sage client and server box did the trick for me. Maybe something else to try?

[jlmdxtv]

About 1 year ago I found the source of my system's stuttering was caused by my APC backup's logging function. It seems APC pulled the entire log back into memory from the HD to re-write it -- instead of doing a simple file append. This file grew to about 75MB over a two year period.

I discovered this by using a stop watch to clock the time between the stutters to see if it was constant, and it was (20 minutes).

I then used sysinternals FILEMON (google it - it's a free download) and watched all the disk I/O that took place exactly when the stutter was expected. I found the APC service was going all out writing to a log file, so I stopped the logging and the problem went away permanently. BTW: I wasn't even logging to the same drive as the Sage recordings but it still affected the playback.

john