Still no fix for stuttering HD playback on SageTV recordings?

[rosemary]

Fixed the problem.

Turns out it was a very simple answer - SuperFetch. Many of you probably already know what that is. If not, just throw it into wikipedia. It wasn't taking up any CPU (at least not as Windows reported it), but a careful watching of the disk usage monitor showed that svchost was repeatedly doing lots of disk reads while watching sagetv recordings (and at other times, but this was the only place that it seems to cause the stuttering). Svchost does a lot of things, but I finally tracked it down to being the SuperFetch service. Considering that windows always has at least a dozen processes going, it's hard to eliminate background processes. The best you can usually do is tell if the background processes are eating up CPU. The really tricky part is that in this case, it didn't eat up CPU but sure tore up the disk.

Would 64k blocks have "fixed" my problem? Probably not. Do a search for SuperFetch on this forum and you'll find posts by people who had already tried the 64k thing and only found relief when killing SuperFetch. Unfortunately, none of these posts had stuff in it that I found in my searches for similar problems (sadly, one was only missed because they spelled it "studdering"). But once you know to search for "superfetch", a plethora appear.

Final thoughts: I'm sorry I seem to have riled some of you up. I know you only participate in this board out of a desire to help people and I thank you for that. I know sometimes we people being helped can seem a bit frustrating. I know some of you felt that I was stupid (even "assinine") for trying to use my own reasoning abilities rather than just following a list of "things to try." I also know from my own years of troubleshooting software and hardware problems that it doesn't always have to be an "art" instead of a "science." However, if you approach it in an unscientific fashion, it is a lot more likely to turn out that way. By this I mean making large, sweeping and somewhat irreversible changes like going to 64k blocks, switching from Vista to XP, installing another set of decoders, etc.

You may "fix" the problem just be completely altering the environment you are working in. But there's no guarantee you won't create new problems that you will have to pull your hair out all over again somewhere else down the road. Right now I have every single video and audio format playing through SageTV just fine. I tremble at the suggestion of replacing all of my decoders. You should always start out with the easy things to try that can be done in isolation and are easily reversible. This allows you to actually know you fixed the problem rather than hoping it doesn't come back.

I plan on continuing with my 4k blocks, simply based on the oldest troubleshooting motto of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." My system runs beautifully other than the now-fixed stuttering issue.

I would also suggest that Sage add turning off SuperFetch as one of the first suggestions for people in Vista having stuttering video problems in Vista.

Thank you, and happy troubleshooting.

[othy]

Originally Posted by spoon

I plan on continuing with my 4k blocks, simply based on the oldest troubleshooting motto of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." My system runs beautifully other than the now-fixed stuttering issue.

I would also suggest that Sage add turning off SuperFetch as one of the first suggestions for people in Vista having stuttering video problems in Vista.

Thank you, and happy troubleshooting.

Good catch. I wouldn't have thought of superfetch, but I'm glad it was something simple to fix.

I don't know what your usage is like with SageTV (I think I remember you saying you only record a couple of shows with it), but if you intend to record more than a few things, I'd still suggest keeping it in the back of your mind to add a separate partition when possible.

In my case, I was just stupid and meant to format with 64k clusters but forgot. I had no problems at first, but then my drive started to fill up and sure enough--stuttering. And by then I had too much data to back up. But, maybe not an issue for you if you're only recording a limited amount of video.

Incidentally, in my case I just asked around at work. If you work with computer people or tech-savvy people in general, one of them is bound to have an external drive you could borrow for a weekend to back up while you make changes. And not to be flippant about money (I'm a poor teacher who works with other poor teachers!), but drives are so inexpensive that someone is bound to have one you can borrow. And a $15 USB to SATA/IDE cable makes any drive a temporary external drive.

This is not intended as a jab at your reluctance to try 64k clusters, just a genuine suggestion based on what I went through.

Tim

[rosemary]

No offense taken whatsoever.

That would be one of those cases where I'd completely understand how 64k clusters would be called for. Of course, if I went to 64k clusters now, it would probably be SOONER that I'd be close to filling up the disk. As it stands, I'm going to try to keep about 15% free for my regularly scheduled defrag to do any good.

My typical usage is that I copy files to the media PC after first ripping them on another desktop (alas, one without 350 gigs to spare for a backup, either). So the fragmentation is kept to a minimum because the file copy pre-allocates the entire file size in one continguous (if possible) block.

As far as the borrowing work idea, there's a bit of a problem. I telecommute and only fly into the office about once every couple of months or more.

It's still a bit of a mystery to me why superfetch had much more of an impact on sage than on the other media players (smplayer, windows media player, media player classic). I can imagine that one player, like WMP might be doing tricks and such, but not all three. Maybe there is something sage is doing that makes it prone to these types of disruptions.