Sage/Live TV works for awhile, then garbage

[DaveWC]

I installed SageTV, setup my video source as TV Tuner, Shaw Cable and it worked fine. I watched TV, recorded a show, checked the recording when it was done & it was fine. Then an hour later while I'm just adding some logos for the stations I go back to watch TV and it's a garbled mess. The screen is mostly black but you'll see choppy pictures every so often, the sound is all choppy too. This happened yesterday & I assumed I'd changed something that screwed it up. Rather then trying to figure out what I did I just removed the software, and reinstalled from scratch. That worked but now the live tv is a mess again.

It's a new computer, I'm recording to a totally empty 1TB drive. Nothing else is running in the background. The machine is overpowered if anything. I'm using a Hauppauge PVR 500 tuner, only one connected so far. It's not digital TV, just Shaw Classic. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[DaveWC]

btw, I went back to the configuration wizard and the "Configure Video Playback" routine and set it to basic, medium, standard & advanced. They all had the same problems. I also configured the 2nd tuner on the card and it reacts the same way.

I'm also able to playback the recording I made when the tuner was working. It plays fine. I had the quality set to Great then. I've tried watching live tv at the worst quality possible with no effect.

I reformatted the storage drive for recorded videos so use a 64kb cluster and it had no positive effect.

[DaveWC]

Ok I switched off indexing and that has made the live TV work. Now the only issue is that if I record one show & try & watch another the show I watch is all broken up & choppy. If I stop recording & just watch one show it's fine. This is a Hauppauge PVR-500 card, it should allow me to record one & watch another shouldn't it?

[DaveWC]

After all of this tinkering with Vista I'm starting to think I'd be better off just starting over with XP. Any thoughts? I've read from lots of others on this forum using Sage with Vista so I know it can work. It just seems you have to disable so much of Vista just to get this program to work. It doesn't make sense, my CPU utilization is like 5% and yet the live tv stutters while I'm recording another channel.

And the ability to pause/fwd/rev on live tv or recording tv seems odd too. Shouldn't I be able to be watching a show, pause it live, skip backwards 5 minutes, or skip right back to when I started watching? It seems really iffy whether it works. I pause while a commercial is on, come back in 5 and try and move forward, back a bit etc. and it either just goes directly to live or hangs. It doesn't seem to allow me to just click anywhere on the show time and start watching... wants to watch it live only.

[carlgar]

Have you brought up the resouce monitor to see where the bottle neck is? When I first started using Vista I encountered studdering when viewing HD shows. I saw that another Vista task was accessing the same file which turned out to be the superfetch task. Once I turned that off I have not seen any other issues. However, I very seldom watch live TV.

[DaveWC]

No, I hadn't thought of that. Thanks a lot. I check it and I see both System & SageTV writing to the mpg file for both shows. I'm not sure how to figure out what Vista process is causing this. I also see the $MftMirr file being written to like mad. Otherwise the CPU isn't being overutilized, but the hdd seems to be. Any help would be appreciated.

[carlgar]

Make sure you have stopped watching live TV and see what happens with the IO. Then start watching live TV. I would expect 2 accesses to the file for Live TV. Sage is recording the show and then you are reading the file at the same time. Based upon what I see on my system the Sage access is a write and the system access is a read. The $MftMirr sounds like it is a Master File Table Mirror but I do not see it on my system. I only see $Mft being accessed.

[DaveWC]

That's the weird thing. I've got SageTV writing the file for live viewing & System writing to the same file. And this is while just watching TV, no add'l recording. So it works fine, I can watch it, stuttering. But why is it writing in two sessions? The Write (B/min) are like 40Mb for each session. No processes show as reading so I'm assuming that the System is reading what the Sage is writing.

[carlgar]

I just checked my system while watching live TV and I only see the 2 expected accesses to the file. Are you using SP1 RC1 or the original VISTA? Where is your video area at? Does it have its own partition? Does it have its own disk?

[DaveWC]

I'm seeing two accesses to the file too. Both writing large amounts.

I have updated Vista with all of the available updates. I haven't seen SP1 RC1 yet. I guess I have to manually choose it.

[carlgar]

Is it possible you have a defragmenter running on the disk? That is the only reason I can think of for 2 processes writing to the same file. Check the PID for the second task and then find in in the task manager and try to figure out what the program is or does. You do have to manually install SP1 RC1 but the final SP1 is supposed to be released in mid March.

[DaveWC]

When I check the PID for the System task it references to SMSS.EXE. I had earlier checked my defrag and it was scheduled to work once a day at 2:00am or something like that. It's definitely not working right now. But something must be doing some writing.

[carlgar]

I think you may have a virus. I googled smss.exe and found the following:
Windows errors related to smss.exe ?
smss.exe is a process which is a part of the Microsoft Windows Operating System. It is called the Session Manager Subsystem and is responsible for handling sessions on your system. This program is important for the stable and secure running of your computer and should not be terminated.

Note: smss.exe is a process which is registered as a trojan. This Trojan allows attackers to access your computer from remote locations, stealing passwords, Internet banking and personal data. This process is a security risk and should be removed from your system.

Determining whether smss.exe is a virus or a legitimate Windows process depends on the directory location it executes or runs from. Check that smss.exe is stable on your computer.

[DaveWC]

I had seen that. The SMSS that is active on my machine is in the SYSTEM32 directory. It's not creating errors either, just pigging out my machine, ha.

btw, upon further checking there are lots of indicators of whether the SMSS I'm watching is a virus and this computer has none of those indicators.

[DaveWC]

Nothing seems to work for long. And nothing allows me to record one channel & watch another. I'm going to start over with XP next week and see how that goes.