Five days of Bliss

[jphhughes]

Five days of bliss.

Well on August 20 (as I reported on this forum) I though I had solved all of my problems with SageTV until yesterday. For five days the systems performed flawlessly. Then last night while watching TV I started to get this stuttering/picture flashing. It would seem to cure itself after several seconds but as soon as I would change a channel it would happen again. While this was happening the system was slow to respond. How does it work for five days and then all of a sudden develop a problem like this? I am beginning to think after months of working with this product that it is just plain unstable.

I have read several posts here and they seem to imply that stuttering can be caused by too high a recording rate or possible HD fragmentation. I did bump up the recording rate of the weekend because I was not happy with the picture quality while watching sporting events. Also started using some of the favorite features of the product , so it is recording more shows and although the hardrive (200MB) is not near full their are a lot more files in the video director. Also another point, this system is dedicated to the PVR function so the hardrive is formatted in 64K blocks. However about a week ago I used the windows disc fragmentation tool which suggested the d: partition be de-fragmented, so I defragmenter it. Last night I ran the program again and it again show the drive fragmented and suggested de-fragmentation. It was my loose understanding that by formatting the HD in 64k block fragmentation would be minimized?

Once again any help or suggestion would be appreciated.

[jptaz]

Do you ever let/put the system in standby or hibernate?
If So are you using SageWake to restart SageTV on resume?

Have you tried disabling services that are not needed?
www.blackviper.com has a list of the system services on windows XP that can be disabled. I went through and disabled a number of services that are not needed on my Client PC which is substancially less powerfull than your PC and I am driving my HD TV via DVI at 1280 x 720 using 3.25GB /HR recording setting and now my system is much more reliable and does not stutter much at all ( at this point it seems to happen at times when I am hitting my network hard ). Note for now I am not running SageRecorder on this machine while I am trying to resolve my pause/stutter issues.

Also I discovered, to my dismay, that when the Schedule look ahead is set to more than 3 Days I run into stuttering problems on my SageTVClients as it seems to take a long time to handle the scheduling of shows and uses 100% CPU for extended periods of time...this seems like a bad programming design that the scheduling process would be allowed to take higher priority than the Display/playback and servicing of SageTVClient Streams.

You may want to consider disabling all non essential networking options:

Uncheck all but "Internet Protocol(TCP/IP)" in the list in the network connections properties.

Click on Properties for "Internet Protocol(TCP/IP)" and click "Advanced.." button.
Select the "WINS" tab and click on the "Disable NetBios over TCP/IP".

This will prevent you from being able to connect to the computer using file or printer sharing or connecting to other PC from this PC, but since this is a dedicated PC for SageTV it should not be a problem.

Just a few ideas.

Also you may want to figure out why the stutter occurs by opening the taskmanager and then minimize it so that you can pull it up to see what is happening at the time of the stuttering ( High CPU or High network traffic and see what process is using CPU if that is the case).

When I was trying to figure out my bug I found that I had not enabled direct X Video acceleration and my decoder was using 85% to 100% when playing back video and once it was enabled it went down to 45% to 75%.

Just making stabs in the dark here, hope this helps.

John

[falchulk]

jptaz, with v2 I have had the same stutter when coming out of standby that you seem to be hinting at. It seems to only happen when sagewake or jman's wake utility (what I use) brings it out of standby to record. If it is awakend maunally its fine. It's a very strange problem. You can get rid of the stuttering by closing and restarting sage. Not just a power off but actually closing and restarting.

[insomniac]

did your HD mode change by chance?

I.

EDIT:

Reason I ask is this:

A while back, I had a pile of hard drives on my server. For some reason, everytime I had one of them powered up (found out from tons of troubleshooting..), my client machine would studder and be extremely slow between channel changes(major studder during and after channel changes up to 10 seconds).

After making sure that all HD settings were correct, etc..I just shook my head and figured that it was network, and all other symptoms were coincidence.

After time, I made attempt to configure network every which way but loose, without luck. The one thing that I did get from network changes is that sage definitively (for me at least) likes network on auto and hates full duplex...dont ask why...it was 1000 full duplex anyway..sigh. The other thing that I got that lead back to the hard drive in question was that with that hard drive in play, latency between the 2 machines would jump up 50ms!

After troubleshooting many configurations(different slave settings, jumpers, making sure that it was in correct DMA), I just plain gave up. Formatted it, borrowed one of my other hard drives and swapped it out. Fixed.

What an extremely annoying rollercoaster it was.

Yes, jumping up the quality did pronounce the issue more. No it wasnt the problem. The underlined problem for me was shotty network performance due to some very odd hardware conflict or issue(never seen anything quite like this one in 15 years of professional computing).

My client now runs in any quality mode i choose without any sort of studder.

Maybe some day this will help some other helpless sage user. I know it made me want to give up many of times!

I.

When I couldnt tollerate it anylonger

[jphhughes]

John thanks for the detailed reply. I am using Sage wake and do put the PC in standby as a standard practice. I am using a program from Microsoft called Devcon which allow me to restart the Hauppauge cards after coming out of standby. This seemed to have solved my last problems of TV out freezes. IF I don't restart them they are useless until I do a system reboot. So does this use of standby cause stuttering problems? I do not have my system networked. I did bump us the epg data from 3 days to 14. Is this what you mean when you say "Schedule look Ahead"?
I had looked at the black viper site and considered turning off some of the services but chickened out. The last thing I need at this time to screw that up. I will use task manager as you suggested and step down the look ahead to 3 days.

[jphhughes]

Originally posted by insomniac
did your HD mode change by chance?

I.

I don't know what you mean by hard drive mode. Thanks

[insomniac]

read my edited reply above.

[insomniac]

hmmm...would it also be coincidence that my server in question was also a Intel 865 PERLL mobo?

It has been a rock (as far as stability goes) before and ever since that issue. But I just had to throw it out there....

[jphhughes]

insomniac
Thanks for the additional detailed information. I have found over the years when it comes to software problems the first question you should ask is what changes have I made recently. With that in mind I will back track and revert all of the setting I changed (recording rate, 14 day EPG etc) to default. I will also check on the hardrive as you suggested. I don't think its the MOBO. I have not had this problem until now so I suspect it has something to do with my current situation inclluding possible the fact athat the systems is recording more shows then ever before.

[falchulk]

Originally posted by jphhughes
John thanks for the detailed reply. I am using Sage wake and do put the PC in standby as a standard practice. I am using a program from Microsoft called Devcon which allow me to restart the Hauppauge cards after coming out of standby. This seemed to have solved my last problems of TV out freezes. IF I don't restart them they are useless until I do a system reboot. So does this use of standby cause stuttering problems? I do not have my system networked. I did bump us the epg data from 3 days to 14. Is this what you mean when you say "Schedule look Ahead"?
I had looked at the black viper site and considered turning off some of the services but chickened out. The last thing I need at this time to screw that up. I will use task manager as you suggested and step down the look ahead to 3 days.

Does the stuttering persist if you restart sage? Is it present immediately after a reboot and before the Pc's sleep?

[jptaz]

insomniac,

Do you mean that you had power management enabled and your hard drives would spin down and on the spin give you the stutter?

All my drives are using DMA 5 or 6 and I never have them power down. I wait for the whole system to hibernate as I ran into the same issue with my Hard Drives waking from sleep...it was even worse because it would impact the recordings.

I will try to switch my network to auto detect and see if that helps things. I have all my machines set 100 Full Duplex. I am hoping that this solves my problems.

[insomniac]

No, I always run my Hard drives on always on. My problem was just one specific HD bringing down the entire machine.

Hope Auto works for you

I.

Originally posted by jptaz
insomniac,

Do you mean that you had power management enabled and your hard drives would spin down and on the spin give you the stutter?

All my drives are using DMA 5 or 6 and I never have them power down. I wait for the whole system to hibernate as I ran into the same issue with my Hard Drives waking from sleep...it was even worse because it would impact the recordings.

I will try to switch my network to auto detect and see if that helps things. I have all my machines set 100 Full Duplex. I am hoping that this solves my problems.

[insomniac]

FYI:

I am using 7 tuners, recording to 3 HD's. If configured correctly, that should not be an issue.

I.

Originally posted by jphhughes
insomniac
Thanks for the additional detailed information. I have found over the years when it comes to software problems the first question you should ask is what changes have I made recently. With that in mind I will back track and revert all of the setting I changed (recording rate, 14 day EPG etc) to default. I will also check on the hardrive as you suggested. I don't think its the MOBO. I have not had this problem until now so I suspect it has something to do with my current situation inclluding possible the fact athat the systems is recording more shows then ever before.

[ToxMox]

Just a note. I have a thinkpad that I constantly put into standby and wake it again just to quickly check email etc. Once in a while I'll wake it and it will act extremely slow and the cpu pegs on all kinds of things. Then once I reboot all is well again. I realize that no one here is talking about a laptop but perhaps there are some inherent problems with using standby too much.

[jptaz]

Definitely a possibility ToxMox...

I never used to put my machine in standby or hibernate, before I had these
problems, but I also was running on Sage 1.4 and using standby with no problems as I recall. I do not recall if I was using auto detect for the network or not.

John

[jptaz]

insomniac,

How were you able to discover the bad drive? I have 7 drives in my computer, 6 are used for SageTV Recordings. It maybe that once in a while when a recording happens to go to the faulty drive is when things get ugly.

[insomniac]

Well luckily, it was the last one I added to the machine. After I put that together, I pulled it and then tested(course i went through every possible step first...sigh). After that, my client worked perfectly.

I also got a lucky clue from another source. I run a game server, and after the drive was added, I suddenly had much higher pings on it. My normal was 2 ping, so it wasnt hard to find. Thats what actually sparked my HD troubleshooting to start.

I would suggest to you that you take it down to 1 hard drive, then test and see if all your problems go away. Go from there.

Your mileage may vary...

I.

Originally posted by jptaz
insomniac,

How were you able to discover the bad drive? I have 7 drives in my computer, 6 are used for SageTV Recordings. It maybe that once in a while when a recording happens to go to the faulty drive is when things get ugly.

[turak]

Originally posted by insomniac
After time, I made attempt to configure network every which way but loose, without luck. The one thing that I did get from network changes is that sage definitively (for me at least) likes network on auto and hates full duplex...dont ask why...it was 1000 full duplex anyway..sigh.

Never set a NIC manually if the switch that it's connected to is set to auto negotiate. They need to either both be set to auto or both be set to whatever it is you want it to run at. You tend to get alot of packet loss otherwise.

Edit:
I remeber once getting over 140 pages in one hour for services failing on servers because some idiot in network operations set a port on an HP4000 to auto when the HP2424 on that port was set to 100 Full.

[insomniac]

That happens more than you know

Originally posted by turak
Never set a NIC manually if the switch that it's connected to is set to auto negotiate. They need to either both be set to auto or both be set to whatever it is you want it to run at. You tend to get alot of packet loss otherwise.

Edit:
I remeber once getting over 140 pages in one hour for services failing on servers because some idiot in network operations set a port on an HP4000 to auto when the HP2424 on that port was set to 100 Full.

[jptaz]

Hmmm....

I turned off auto detect on my NIC cards and it did not help any. When the pause happened this time I had Taskmanager running on the server and the client. Network and CPU usage dropped to nothing. I do not know if this indicates a network failure or a disk delay.

Any ideas how to determine the cause of this CPU and Network drop?

John