1st post 1st real problem

[panteragstk]

Hey guys. 1st time poster. i've yet to buy sage because of my latest batch of problems. don't get me wrong, i love sage, but my hauppauge hdtv card is giving me problems. i can watch live tv no problem. i can record tv no problem. as soon as i try to timeshift or watch a saved video i get random freezes. if i try to look at my guide while watching tv it freezes. EVERY other aspect of sagetv works to perfection without any problems whatsoever.

specs are as follows.
gigabyte s3 965p motherboard
e6300 dual core cpu. 1.86ghz to 3.5ghz no performance change.
hauppauge hvr-1600 x1 using ota hdtv only w/strong signal.
using crappy on board sound w/ ac3filter encoding ac3.
daamit (ati/amd) 3450 passive.
seperate hdd formatted to 64k cluster for tv recording.
gyration rf mce remote.
sagetv 6.4 trial
sagemce addon

with my configuration i have very low cpu usage and excellent video quality no matter what type of video i play. all sound being encoded to ac3 works well until asus hdav1.3 comes out. i have read and searched these forums extensively for a solution and haven't found one yet. i do want to give the members of this forum credit for answering every concievable question up to this point. well done guys. as soon as if find a solution to this problem i will be purchasing sagetv with a hauppauge hd-pvr to complete my setup. thanks in advance.

[dvd_maniac]

You should enable debug logging, wait for a crash and post the log file here and/or send it to tech support.

[panteragstk]

i forgot to mention that my internet is down at the moment. i am posting using my phone so bear with me. i checked the log and it seems that sage is trying to scan my VAST music collection while watching tv causing it to hang. at least that is the way i'm reading it. seems odd to me.

[panteragstk]

after removing my music hard drive from import directories i again tried to watch tv and timeshift. after punishing sage with more rewinds and ff than it will ever see during normal usage i got it to freeze again. it seems that my diskbar addin may have something to do with the problem. it looks like it is updating too much. right before the hang my log says needfreesize=1.4$25gb currffreesize=153"401163776gb
seeker waiting for 57 mins.
hang
ministry is waiting for 180 sec
hang

after that i closed sage with the task manager and typed this message.

[dvd_maniac]

So, with the Music imported Sage freezes alot and without the music it takes a bit to get it to freeze?
How big is your music and video directories?

I have over 10,000 Imported movies and TV episodes and almost 8200 songs and although my UI sometimes gets sluggish and video sometimes hiccups, It very rarely actually freezes.
How long do you wait before trying to kill Sage?

[panteragstk]

20k music files i would guess a thousand or so videos. i do have the encoding set to maximum quality. could that be it? the sluggishness because of scanning makes sense, but all out freezing? i don't necessarily wait long for it to unfreeze, but i shouldn't have too. with all of the other things i have sage doing i would think it would freeze during a 1080p 15mbps video file playback before timeshifting tv. that is quite a bit more stressful. now if i look at it as recording a source while viewing the same source i could see how that could be stressful to sage. this is a dedicated pc so whatever i need to do configuration or hardware wise i am willing to do it. i just need this to be flawless for "wife approval".

[panteragstk]

i forgot to mention that other people have more extensive collections than me and don't have this problem. i also will be adding a dvd collection of about 500 movies or so and i don't want them to add to the problem. i would think that there is some sort of configuration to fix this problem. i'm not trying to be a pain but i just want to narrow it down to a software or hardware problem. as many thoughts as possible are very welcome.

[planetc]

Maybe unrelated but I had issues with 'similar' timings that were solved by setting the generate video thumbnails property to false. My very sluggish, almost unusable ui became pretty slick afterwards. Possibly worth a try at least?

[dvd_maniac]

Another good thing to try would be to increase your Java heap size. This solved most of my sluggishness.
One thing that probably adds to my issue was that I have metadata tags for everyone of my Imported videos. This really slowed things down and increasing the Heap size really helped.

[panteragstk]

thumbnails have caused me problems in the past so I bet that would help. How would I increase java heap size? any ideas on how to stop sage from scanning my music collection? I still want sage to monitor it for changes, but the constant scanning needs to stop. once a day would be fine. or even less.

thanks again for the help.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by panteragstk

How would I increase java heap size?

Do a tag search for 'heap' and it will give 1 result for a topic that explains this.

And you can stop automatic library rescans via Setup -> Detailed Setup -> Customize -> Regularly rescan import directories. After that, you can easily force a rescan from the Setup menu or via the Options command in any imported media browser.

- Andy

[panteragstk]

I'm pretty sure that the rescan import directories option was the culprit. thanks for all your help guys. I will report back to confirm.

I do have an off topic question now though. I don't currently have an internet connection, if I buy a key online will sage continue to work even though the sage box isn't connected to the internet? I ask this because some software has to verify authinticity with the server.

Thanks.

[panteragstk]

I searched for heap and got a topic with no instructions on where to change the size only what affect it may have. it would be easier to link it for me than to tell me what search parameter to use. not trying to be rude but there is a reason i have never posted before. this board is very thorough and ihave been able to find my answers without asking until now.

[HelenWeathers]

http://forums.freytechnologies.com/f...ad.php?t=23681

Never had to do this myself, but if you read thru the post it mentions how to use regedit to locate the java heap variable. Hope this helps.

[panteragstk]

well, none of those suggestions worked and now i am having problems tuning channels that worked previously. i don't understand why this giving me so many problems. are there any other people having this much trouble with this particular tuner card?

[panteragstk]

ok. i unplugged my antenna to see what happened. i get a better signal without it than with it? i don't get why a coax cable works better than an antenna on certain channels. i also dont understand why my fox station's video is choppy all of a sudden. but if i restart sage the problem goes away for a while. do you guys think this is a hardware or software issue? the only thing i haven't tried is updating all of my drivers which will be difficult without an internet connection.

[Djc208]

If that seemed to help I'd look at the cable and it's connections. It could be as simple as a bad connection at the antenna (or a bad antenna), and removing it removed more interference than it added.

Another issue is that digital OTA (or even QAM) seems to be very finicky about connection quality, and the tuners are too. It could simply be that a the weather has changed, which would affect your OTA signal slightly (especially with no antenna), and the tuner (which was marginal before) is worse now. This was one of the reasons I ended up recording the Clear QAM singal vice OTA. OTA had better picture but was less reliable. The newest Hauppage drivers are supposed to help but with a recent build you may already have them.

If it goes away on re-boot I'd guess it's a software issue. Unfortunatly that tuner card seems to be hit or miss. Mine has worked perfectly since day one in three different machines now, but I've seen a lot of posts with various problems.

As for playback issues always look over anything that can slow down disk access. Anti-virus programs, comskip running concurrently, etc. can all eat up HDD access and cause a slowdown.

As for the registration without internet, I don't know for certain but I don't think a connection is required. My impression was that the key was just that, a code that unlocked the software, not one that was verified against a central server, but I've never tested it myself.

[panteragstk]

I agree about signal quality. I'm still weighing my options as far as ota or qam goes. Reliability is key and I think a better antenna is the answer for now. I just downloaded new drivers for my whole system at work to give that a try. I don't have any other programs other than sage and my ati control panel and all that comes with that. I think the new drivers should help. I will report back once I load the new drivers. I just seemed odd to me that recording works and live tv works but not timeshifting. thanks again.

[panteragstk]

when i installed the new drivers and java version i now get a myasynflt.ax error. any ideas?

[panteragstk]

i reinstalled sage and i still get the myasynflt.ax error. the catalyst controll center version 8.9 may be the culprit. any one else ever had this error?