MVP Playback Choppy

[jpaddock3000]

So I'm still using the old wired MVP and for some reason, just lately, it is giving me choppy video. Either recordings or movies off the hard drive. This has never happened before. I've had 4 shows recording while watching another show without an issue before. The server CPU is very minimal when watching a recording and at about 30% when watching a movie because of transcoder. I have a core 2 duo 2.4Ghz, 2GB memory, 500GB SATA2 HD, 100mbit switch. What is odd, is if the video playback start to be choppy, I will press pause for like 10 seconds, and then it is able to playback again. Not sure if this is a Sage issue or my HD is going out. I had the last stable release installed when I started to notice the issue, so I upgraded to the beta hoping for a fix, but the same results appear. This also happens for live tv as well. Let me know if there is any more information that I can give you.

Thanks in advance.

[QueOnda]

try to see if you have your server is connected to 100mb (or if you have 1gb) correctly.

Turn off anivirus (if you recently turn on).

Did you do any updates? SP3?

You can do some hard disk tests to see if if anything is faulty.

[jpaddock3000]

My gigabit switch is actually in the RMA process currently. It was a little faulty. It is now connected to a 100mbit switch.

I have not upgraded to SP3, still on SP2.

Antivirus is on, I guess I can try and disable auto-protect and see if anything gets better. Any other ideas?

Thanks

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by jpaddock3000

My gigabit switch is actually in the RMA process currently. It was a little faulty. It is now connected to a 100mbit switch.

I have not upgraded to SP3, still on SP2.

Antivirus is on, I guess I can try and disable auto-protect and see if anything gets better. Any other ideas?

Thanks

It sounds like a network or hard drive bandwidth issue. Obviously it could be anything, but your server should definately be powerful enough to handle it.

Are you doing HD in anyway or is it SD only? What version of Java are you running? Could you be maxing out your java heap size?

[jpaddock3000]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

It sounds like a network or hard drive bandwidth issue. Obviously it could be anything, but your server should definately be powerful enough to handle it.

Are you doing HD in anyway or is it SD only? What version of Java are you running? Could you be maxing out your java heap size?

I'm only doing SD currently. I would like to go to HD, but at a later time.

I'm running Java 2 Runtime Environment, SE v.1.4.2_16
Java 6 Update 3.

I don't know about the Java heap size. Is that something that is easy to max out?

[Rezolution]

I had this same exact problem on my media extender whether i used it at 100M or 1000M connections. It turned out to be the cable... I made it myself and didnt follow the standard wiring code. By not following the standard Cat5E wiring colors, i made a "straight through" cable but since it was about 20 feet long, I was getting interference inside the cable.

I remade the cable to the standard wire colors which meant the signals were traveling on 'different wire pairs' or whatever. Once I did that, all my stuttering issues went away.

If you're using 'cat5' cable, I'd recommend trying cat5e or cat6 cable.

It may sound stupid but I was banging my head against the wall for a long time before I figured that out...

[jpaddock3000]

I can try another cable. I don't have any packet loss and if I just press pause for a little while, then it is able to play smooth, but it doesn't hurt to try. I have plenty of cables lying around.

[172pilot]

@Rezolution: Just so you know, the COLORS themselves dont matter, but the twists in the wire must be on the right pins. In otherwords, data in one direction goes on pins 1 and 2, and data in the other direction go on pins 3 and 6. the wires which have the same color (orange / orange white being one pair, for example) are twisted in the sheath, so you need "pairs" of wire on 1/2 and 3/6. The problem is that if you dont understand that, and just make the pairs 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 7-8, then you've got "split pairs" because you're using one wire from one pair for pin 3, and another wire from a different pair on pin 6, which will give you trouble, as you experienced.

Hope that helps explain..


Anyway, MY question about MVP playback being choppy is that I've got some standard def recordings, which work fine over the MVP, and some HD recordings (made by Hauppauges HD-PVR or a Hauppauge OTA HD PCI tuner that work fine on my HD extender, but they stutter on my MediaMVP...

Can anyone suggest a way I could correct the stutter when playing HD video back to the MVP? My suspicion is that the MVP can't handle the data rate coming in, since the HD extender displays the same content fine...

I suspect I need to tell Sage to transcode to 480i, but I dont want it to ALWAYS do it - only when I go to my MVP, not the high-def set... Is this even possible? And, if it is possible, am I just asking for trouble because of the load put on the SageTV box doing the transcoding?

Any help would be appreciated!! Still trying to impress the wife on this one! ;-)

-Steve

[mbowe]

Hey guys, I'm having a similar problem, but only after 10-20 minutes of playback. Things will work fine for some time, but then start to stutter and then eventually lock up. During all my testing, everytihng worked great, very responsive, great picture, not a hint of stutter in TV playback, but I only watched for about 5 minutes or so at a time. So after testing and tuning the server and both the MVP and an HD extender for a few weeks, I handed the MVP remote to the wife last night. After winning in the living room with the switch from VMC to the Sage HD extender, I got knocked back a few steps as she wanted to watch more then 10-20 minutes of TV at a time.

I have a 3Gig Core 2 Duo w/ 4Gig of ram, local disks & running Vista Ultimate. I've increased the JVM Heap to ~768 on the server as that was getting maxed out with everything running at the same time, but otherwise see minimal load on the Server. I am runing the MVP over a wireless bridge, but it is a solid connection, and as I don't see any latency or stuttering for such long periods and then basically lose it all, I don't think it's the netowrk.

I'll do more troubleshooting tonight when I get home, I just thought I'd see if anyone has any quick hints for me to start with.

Thank Much,

-mike

[172pilot]

For regular def stuff, mine has no problem, mine was always hi-def transcoded for the MVP... I ended up with a quad-core AMD chip and 4 gigs of RAM and it STILL isn't enough to do it reliably, so I've resigned myself to just being careful, and only record the hi-def feed if I'm going to watch it on the HD extender. That being said, I've been REALLY happy with the results.

The ONLY thing I can think of in your case would be to check to make sure some power saving setting or screensaver, etc. isn't set for 20 minutes.. Last thing you need is for some performance robbing screen saver to kick in at 20 minutes and suck all the cycles..

Now, can you give me some details on the JVM setting you changed? Maybe that'll do me some good, but I have no idea how to monitor that memory usage as you said you did, or how to set it.. I'd love to see mine..

-Steve

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by 172pilot

For regular def stuff, mine has no problem, mine was always hi-def transcoded for the MVP... I ended up with a quad-core AMD chip and 4 gigs of RAM and it STILL isn't enough to do it reliably, so I've resigned myself to just being careful, and only record the hi-def feed if I'm going to watch it on the HD extender. That being said, I've been REALLY happy with the results.

The ONLY thing I can think of in your case would be to check to make sure some power saving setting or screensaver, etc. isn't set for 20 minutes.. Last thing you need is for some performance robbing screen saver to kick in at 20 minutes and suck all the cycles..

Now, can you give me some details on the JVM setting you changed? Maybe that'll do me some good, but I have no idea how to monitor that memory usage as you said you did, or how to set it.. I'd love to see mine..

-Steve

Steve -

Actually the issue might be that you do not have enough processing power. Last I knew the Transcoder is single threaded. This means that a superfast single core processor would be better at transcoding on the fly than a slow quad core. It takes the equivalent of a core2duo @ 2.4ghz to pull off (I know, because I had to overclock my e4300 to pull it off reliably). Last I checked, the AMD quad cores are not able to match a core2duo @ 2.4ghz in single threaded applications. Maybe the fastest model available, but certainly not the slower models.

I have no problems playing HD material on my MediaMVP as long as my core2duo is running at 2.4ghz.

Thank you,
Paul Beers

[mbowe]

Originally Posted by 172pilot

For regular def stuff, mine has no problem, mine was always hi-def transcoded for the MVP... I ended up with a quad-core AMD chip and 4 gigs of RAM and it STILL isn't enough to do it reliably, so I've resigned myself to just being careful, and only record the hi-def feed if I'm going to watch it on the HD extender. That being said, I've been REALLY happy with the results.

The ONLY thing I can think of in your case would be to check to make sure some power saving setting or screensaver, etc. isn't set for 20 minutes.. Last thing you need is for some performance robbing screen saver to kick in at 20 minutes and suck all the cycles..

Now, can you give me some details on the JVM setting you changed? Maybe that'll do me some good, but I have no idea how to monitor that memory usage as you said you did, or how to set it.. I'd love to see mine..

-Steve

Thanks Steve, I'll look into general server loads, screen savers, or other service(s) that may be coming on and consuming resources. I also need to narrow the issue down, HD vs SD and identify any predictable consistancies in how long it takes to start breaking down, etc.

As to the question on JVM heap size, here is a recent thread explaing how to investigate and modify the java heap size.
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=35983

Hopefully this will help with some of your performance challenges as well. I almost never see the spinning circle anymore on my extenders.

-mike