usb 2.0 nic for hdhr and hd200

[webwalker]

So I'm supposed to take delivery of an HD200 on Monday and last night the integrated 100F NIC on my Sage host burns out. Zappo. Gone. I've got the luck of Job with this rig.

So the host has only two slots (its a flex-ATX board from a Shuttle SN85v4): an AGP port and a PCI slot. And the PCI slot has the PVR150 cap card in it. So I've got no other slots for a PCI NIC, and no other communications bus to hook on to other than USB.

The good news is that I've got USB 2 (480mb/sec) on this board. The quick fix is to BUY a USB2.0 NIC to get the rig back on line.

I'm figuring that each HD stream represents a 20mbit load on the NIC. With two streams coming in simultaneously from the HDHR and one outbound to the HD200 extender all through the same NIC, that's 60mbit of load. If I were dealing with a standard embedded NIC, I'd probably feel marginally comfortable with this. But with any kind of latency, hiccups, or inefficiencies on the USB2 bus. I can see how this might be pushing it a little too close to the edge for the NIC's ability to keep up, or the OS kernel to cope with the stream.

So here's the ask: Does anyone else have experience running this kind setup, with a USB2.0 NIC for this kind of throughput?

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by webwalker

I'm figuring that each HD stream represents a 20mbit load on the NIC. With two streams coming in simultaneously from the HDHR and one outbound to the HD200 extender all through the same NIC, that's 60mbit of load.

I can't really answer your question since I haven't tried a USB NIC (though I am curious). However, you should know that when using the HDHR with the current release of Sage (6.4.8) it uses 40Mb/s for each show you record (actually a little over 38Mb/sec). This is because it is not filtering out the show you are trying to record before streaming to your PC but is instead grabbing all of the sub-channel info (Sage is actually receiving 2 or 3 shows worth of data and then filtering out the shows it doesn't need).

However, the 6.5.x Beta corrects this behavior so that you use the actual bandwidth (5 - 20 Mb/sec depending on content). If you happen to read the release notes for the Beta, this is the feature they call "PID Filtering."

[webwalker]

Thanks tiki; no I didn't know that about the beta. I REALLY hoping we go GA sometime mid-next week, because I'm going to feel silly running beta software (ok, release candidate software) on my pricey extender.

I am very concerned whether the filtering is truly taking place at the HDHR or at the Sage server. This might explain a lot of the reason that I've been tearing my hair out to get the HDHR transmission stable across the network, and haven't been able to passing everything through my one router. The current plan is to move the three media based network components (STV, HDHR and the HD200) all to their own switch that will keep the traffic off the main network. I'm glad to hear this is getting fixed. I just wish I'd known before I reached a level of frustration to have to rearchitect. oh well.

DO you know if this functionality change requires an HDHR firmware flash? Or is this just STV properly requesting the right stream from the HDHR.

M

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by webwalker

DO you know if this functionality change requires an HDHR firmware flash? Or is this just STV properly requesting the right stream from the HDHR.

M

To be honest, I'm still running the 6.4.8 Sage release myself and haven't tried the beta. From what I understand though, this is an issue with the SageTV Core - the HDHR has supported the program filtering for some time, Sage just wasn't programmed to take advantage of it.

If you press <CTL><ALT><DEL> and bring up the windows task manager, then click the tab for "Networking" you will see one or more graphs (one for each network adapter or virtual network adapter in your machine). Locate the graph for your main network interface card (NIC) and monitor utilitization there when you are recording a show. My PC has a 10/100 ethernet port, and I see a solid 40% utilitzation when recording one show (regardless of whether it is SD or HD). It jumps to 80% for two shows.

The BETAS are supposed to fix this, but I have been holding off because I saw a lot of posts about people having other problems with the Betas and I haven't had the time to experiment. In fact I see today that they released a new release candidate (6.5.7) where they rolled back one of the features to match what is in the 6.4.8 release because too many people were having problems with the last beta.

By the way, there is also a troubleshooting post on the Silicone Dust forum (here) that explains how to troubleshoot packet loss problems that are common with certain NIC chipsets.