Live TV issues

[phinehas]

I've had the HD100 for about a week now. I also recently purchased an HDHR and a 500GB Ultra ATA drive that I formatted to 64K. For playing back previously recorded OTA shows, the setup has worked flawlessly. So far, I get great PQ, no hiccups, no FF/RW issues--just pure viewing pleasure.

However, things are not nearly as rosy for watching live TV (OTA). Every once in a while (over the course of an hour-long program), the video will hitch. Often when this happens, I'll lose audio altogether. If I pause for a bit, then hit play again, sometimes the audio will cut back in. It seems that one sure-fire way to mess things up is to click the 2:30 FF button while at or near the end of the buffer. Even when not at the end of the buffer, using the FF/RW buttons seems to make hiccups and audio loss more likely.

Last night, while watching live TV, the extender totally froze. I had to power-cycle the box to get it working again. But what seemed really strange to me was that a section of the buffer for the show I was watching was missing, coinciding with the freezing and re-cycle time. I figured the server would have kept recording even though the extender froze. This makes me wonder whether the issue is with my server instead of my extender.

Any help or insight would be appreciated. I'm trying to sell the wife on this new TV-watching paradigm, but the problems we are having make that increasingly difficult.

[phinehas]

Wow. Either I really stumped everyone or these issues are so well-known and incurable that there's nothing more to say about them.

[Ryand833]

I have the exact same problem with LiveTV...

If I'm at the end of the buffer, the audio will just drop, but like you said if I pause it for a second and hit play, the audio comes back.

Mine also just completely froze on me for the first time while watching hockey on live TV OTA HD.

[BobPhoenix]

There is a setting to increase the playback delay that may help.

[toricred]

What is this Live TV thing you speak of? I vaguely recall it before Sage, but I thought it didn't exist anymore.

[phinehas]

Hehe...yeah, recorded shows are definitely more convenient, especially with a baby in the house. Prime watching times are usually spent getting him fed and into bed. Nonetheless, I still enjoy a bit of channel surfing from time to time.

Lately, I've started having issues with recorded programs as well. The Lost season finale was a recent example. Sometimes when I did FF2/RW2, the show would end up freezing and the audio would drop. The media extender wasn't totally frozen (like at other times) though, and I found I could fix it by switching to LiveTV and then going back to the recording. We made it through, but it was annoying to me, not to mention that the WAF took a major hit.

I heard lots of rave reviews about SageTV. Enough to convince me to give it a try. But my experience so far is falling well short of what I expect for a consumer electronics package. I'm really on the fence about whether or not to continue down this path. For all you SageTV evangelists out there, please let me know if I'm doing something wrong.

[carlgar]

Originally Posted by phinehas

Last night, while watching live TV, the extender totally froze. I had to power-cycle the box to get it working again. But what seemed really strange to me was that a section of the buffer for the show I was watching was missing, coinciding with the freezing and re-cycle time. I figured the server would have kept recording even though the extender froze.

The sounds like it could a known issue that Sage support is aware of. The Hd extender will sometimes freeze for no apparent reason even with recordings. I also would not have expected it to cause any loss of your recordings. Are you sure that you lost some of the recording? Usually, when you restart the HD extender, it starts playing serveral minutes before the freeze position. I never watch live TV so I don't know for sure what it does with live TV.

[toricred]

On a more serious note, what version of Sage and what Firmware are you using on your extender? What version of Java is installed on your server (should be 1.6 update 5 I think). What speed is your network connection between the two?

[phinehas]

Originally Posted by toricred

On a more serious note, what version of Sage and what Firmware are you using on your extender? What version of Java is installed on your server (should be 1.6 update 5 I think). What speed is your network connection between the two?

I'm away from home at the moment, so I'm afraid I cannot be as specific as I'd like.

- I just downloaded SageTV less than two weeks ago, so I should have whatever the latest version is.
- The install for SageTV installed Java for me, so I'm hoping it picked the appropriate (newest?) version.
- I did the Firmware update on the media extender when I set it up (again, less than two weeks ago). It did not find a newer Firmware revision. If I recall correctly, the firmware is 04202008, which I believe is the latest non-beta firmware.
- The server, the media extender, and an HDHR all share a Gigabit switch that is also connected to my Internet router.

[toricred]

What speed of NIC is in your server? Is it one on the board using either the Marvell or Realtek chipset? I've found that using a separate NIC based on an Intel chipset running at gigabit speeds works much better on my system. There's also a a thread in the hardware forum about disabling something about powering down that might help with this.

[phinehas]

Originally Posted by toricred

What speed of NIC is in your server? Is it one on the board using either the Marvell or Realtek chipset? I've found that using a separate NIC based on an Intel chipset running at gigabit speeds works much better on my system. There's also a a thread in the hardware forum about disabling something about powering down that might help with this.

The NIC is onboard and is 100 Base T. I'm not sure what chipset, though I imagine its Realtek. I don't see anything in the system requirements for the Media Extender that indicates this should not work correctly. I'm not sure that I have any open PCI slots in my server for adding NIC cards.

I've seen some others mention ShowAnalyzer and other types of software. Obviously, this won't help with the LiveTV issues, but will running anything like this against my recorded shows help them play back more consistently? On the one hand, I'm thinking that if this does work, then SageTV needs to include it (or some similar processing) as part of their solution. I'm not too keen on shelling out even more money to make a CE device work that is falling short of reasonable expectations. On the other hand, I *am* keen on having something that works.

[toricred]

I only asked about the NIC because with the HDHR being network based and the HD100 being network based, they are sharing the 100Mb connection on the server. That shouldn't be a problem, but I found that when I upgraded my server's connection to gigabit it just worked smoother. My case is somewhat different because I have 2 HD100s, a PC Client, an SD Extender and an HDHR. In addition, I have a mail server and several other PCs on the same network. The HD extender is a CE device, but the server really isn't. For the server to be a CE device the HW and SW configuration would need to be very restrictive. The problem is almost certainly something to do with the server or the network (probably something in the server if you have nothing else on your network consuming bandwidth). I know that a lot of people had problems with lockups on their HD extenders and I believe most of them went away when they upgraded the server to the latest beta (6.4.3). It might have also required updating the firmware on the extender to the latest beta, but I'm not certain. In addition, make sure to disable the power management feature for the NIC on the power management tab of it's properties in Device Manager. That has helped improve performance for several people.