HD100 Issues: stuttering and OSD

[othy]

Hi Everyone,
I've had my HD100 for about 4 days now and I'm seeing two issues.

1. At seemingly random intervals, the OSD pops up as if I had hit the Info button. It stays visible until I do press the info button to get rid of it. This doesn't affect playback, but it's not great for WAF

2. Occasional stuttering. It happens on recordings from all of my different tuners, both HD and SD. It does not happen when viewing imported AVI videos. The stuttering occurs for a few seconds every ten minutes or so and seems to happen often when a commercial is skipped or we FF/RW.

A few notes about my setup. The server is spankin' new, running WHS. I've tried endless combintations of both release and beta versions of the server software and the extender firmware. Playback to an XP client (my desktop PC) seems fine, though I haven't watched nearly as much as on the HD100. All computers and the extender are connected via Cat6 to a gigabit switch (which is in turn connected to a 10/100 router for WAN access). Tuners are an HDHR, an ATI550 and a PVR-500.

Keeping an eye on my task manager during these stutters suggests that CPU is not a problem, nor is network. In fact, I've often copied large files around during playback and the extender seems fine. Conversely, I'll get stuttering when there is no other network traffic.

I've been messing with this all week and I'm afraid I might have tunnel vision. Also, though I've been using Sage for a while now, this is my first server/client setup. Anybody see something obvious that I'm missing? Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Tim

[Opus4]

The OSD pop-up sounds like a known issue using SageMC -- if you are using that interface, as your other posts seem to indicate, then see its section of the forum.

For the stuttering: are the recordings being saved to/played from a drive that has been formatted using 64K clusters? If not, then that is most likely the issue.

- Andy

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by Opus4

The OSD pop-up sounds like a known issue using SageMC -- if you are using that interface, as your other posts seem to indicate, then see its section of the forum.

yes, that "stuck OSD" does happen with SageMC. I traced it back to adding new imported content into the import folders. When Sage autoscans the folders for new content and finds it, it does that stuck pop-up. I'd say its a SageMC bug, but I use it as a undocumented feature If I dumps some stuff into a folder, I use the stuck OSD as a notification that Sage found new stuff without having to manually do a Imported folder scan.

[othy]

Thanks for the quick replies.

I was so busy scouring the extender forum for information on the OSD issue that I never bothered to look in the SageMC forum! And I even saw the thread title "Spurious Info" and thought "what a cool name for a thread".

My two recording drives are both formated with 64k clusters and both are outside the storage pool (can't remember if I mentioned that). Both were recently formatted and have a large amount of free space, if that matters.

It occured to me last night that WHS frequently balances the storage of the shared pools. I'll keep an eye out to see if the stuttering is related to that. I am also going to throttle ShowAnalyzer and make sure that's not related.

Tim

[othy]

Just wanted to follow up on this. The OSD problem was, of course, solved by disabling the automatic scan of the import directories.

I finally got frustrated and just reformatted my server. I normally don't mind doing this, since I keep backups, but the server was so new and the sage install so recent that I figured it couldn't help. It did.

I am finally enjoying my new extender and my WHS server, running latest release (not beta) software and firmware, at least until my HD-PVR arrives--I just got my tracking number via email.

My only lingering issue is what I believe people are referring to as the timeline issue--When I FF or comskip, the audio drops out and video is high-speed for a few seconds, then everything returns to normal. My mind is spinning from reading threads in this subforum, so am I identifying this correctly? My understanding is that it is addressed in the most recent beta, which I'll install with my new HD-PVR.

Thanks for the replies to the thread, guys.

Tim