More than occasional choppiness when changing channels

AboveUnrefined · #1 01-15-2006, 02:50 PM

When I change the channel it often plays back very choppy (sound is fine). Playback is perfectly fine when I do a quick rewind after a couple of seconds. Additionally, while channel surfing it seems like SageTV occasionally locks up and takes about 30 seconds to get going again.

I'm on a 2+Ghz system with 1G of RAM and a 7200 RPM IDE Hard Drive with 8Mb cache and an nVidia Geforce 4000 or something like that.... 2 PVR-150's are in the system as well.... perhaps it's switching between the two thus generating the long lag?

Ikarasu · #2 01-15-2006, 05:17 PM

Same happens to me sometimes. Picture is perfect... Then when I switch a channel, the top half gets all distorted and squigly... I figured it was just the way I set it up. Waiting to move my system to another location and install both PVR cards before I play around with it too much....

on a 2.4 GHZ, 1 GB ram, nvidia card, with PVR 150 incase it matters. I restart my system when it happened and it fixed... right now I'm looking into installing SageTV in redhat, instead of having to use gentoo... so we'll see how it goes

AboveUnrefined · #3 01-15-2006, 05:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ikarasu

Same happens to me sometimes. Picture is perfect... Then when I switch a channel, the top half gets all distorted and squigly...

I am having this happen sometimes as well, I change the channel and then change it back it usually ends up being fine -- but I still need to do a quick rewind so it's not choppy.

Ikarasu · #4 01-15-2006, 07:09 PM

I've made a video of it with my camera... Just incase the author wants to see what it's like. The video is in DivX...although I'm sure everyone has it already

http://www.bunnydeaths.com/video.avi

I switched it from S-video to composite... back to S-video, and it fixed. So I guess it isnt much of a prroblem...long as it doesnt start getting scrambled in the middle of watching, and just uppon adding a new source and stuff

I still havent fully played with this. I need to move some things around in my room... setup my other PVR card in the comp...then I'll test Video out annd stuff. I REALLY like the quality on the monitor... Usually since monitor has more DPI, the quality is really bad... but now... it barelly looks fuzzy at all.... Just need to brush up on my linux skills...and this will be the perfect program

[edit] Hmm... I was flipping channels and it started to do it again... anyone else besides us two having this problem?

AboveUnrefined · #5 01-15-2006, 09:40 PM

Ikarasu:

Sorry to drag on your bandwidth a bit but I checked out your video and I would like to confirm that I am having the exact same problem occasionally along with the choppy video when changing the channel... I would also like to add that I'm pretty sure that if I change the channel back and rewind to where it was being choppy, it wasn't anymore.... I will confirm this tomorrow afternoon because the occurence isn't very rare.

Additionally, I'd like to compare system specs with you as I think it'd benefit the whole community to see what kind of platforms we are running on (chipsets, etc.)... I'll post more detailed specs tomorrow as well because unfortunately I need to rest now.

Ikarasu · #6 01-15-2006, 10:51 PM

Ah... No problem

I dont use the site for anything... So it basically has unlimited bandwidth :\

My computer specs are:

Intel Penium 2.4 GHZ
Geforce MX-2 Video card (I havent tried with Video out... using a 19 inch monitor)
I have 2 200 GB HD's in... only using one so far.
1 GB DDRam

I dont have my sound card hooked up... basically thats all thats in it. Using a PVR-150 Haupage card

Narflex · #7 01-16-2006, 12:39 PM

Try increasing the value of videoframe/local_encoding_to_playback_delay in the Sage.properties file (/opt/sagetv/usr/). Do it while SageTV is NOT running. The value is in milliseconds; it should resolve the issue. Let me know.

AboveUnrefined · #8 01-16-2006, 02:39 PM

I just tried rewinding tv to where it was previously doing the top quarter flickering and it did keep doing it if I did have it recording... once I stopped recording and changed the channel back and forth it stopped.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Narflex

Try increasing the value of videoframe/local_encoding_to_playback_delay in the Sage.properties file (/opt/sagetv/usr/). Do it while SageTV is NOT running. The value is in milliseconds; it should resolve the issue. Let me know.

Thanks for the recommendation and I'll do that within the next couple hours to report my findings, it does sound like that would do it.

The specs for the system being used is as follows:
Intel Celeron D 2.13 Ghz (Has 256k cache)
Biostar P4M800-M4 motherboard - Using VIA P4M800 chipset - integrated graphics DISABLED
Two Hauppauge PVR-150 tv cards
1 Gig of DDR memory
250 Gig Hitachi 7200 RPM IDE hard drive
nVidia Geforce 4000 - using TV out via S-Video cable

AboveUnrefined · #9 01-16-2006, 04:14 PM

Increasing the value of videoframe/local_encoding_to_playback_delay in the Sage.properties file fixed the choppy video -- thanks for the support, Narflex. The magic number seems to be 2000 for me. The top quarter flickering still *very occassionally* pops up now and then... at this point I think it might be finicky with the signal quality.

zoop · #10 02-03-2006, 08:34 PM

i have my delay set to 4000 and am still encountering the flickering on the pvr150 w/ s-video input. any other things to try?

thx

/jer

AboveUnrefined · #11 02-03-2006, 08:41 PM

I just upgraded to 4.1.6 and now encounter the choppiness for the initial channel displayed, but when changing the channel it does fine.

Additionally - the top quarter bug still happens, I got a recording doing it through the whole movie... I have the delay up to 5000 now.

Furthermore - After flipping through ~3 channels both clients and the server locks up (Sage symbol rotates like it's working, can't do anything unless I want to buffer it up after it's done working where it'll go up 20 channels if you hit channel up 20 times) for a good 30 seconds plus. But, once it gets going again I can rewind where it was hanging - I get over this by not even using channel up/down and using the guide at all times but it's bad for demo purposes as it turns off many potential clients.

Any suggestions or similar experiences?

zoop · #12 02-09-2006, 07:35 AM

any luck after a few days or is it still happening? i find it strange that it is only my pvr-150 having these issues...

AboveUnrefined · #13 02-09-2006, 06:17 PM

Unfortunately the above mentioned is still happening... the brief lock up is very annoying as it happens a lot when I switch between the news channels -- it's almost like the server is just going "I want to annoy you and make you wait a little while before I'll actually start showing you what I'm recording". The initial choppiness for the first displayed channel is acting like the delay isn't even being considered.

The black top quarter is still going on a very small occasion. It appears random.

I'm using 2 PVR-150s in the system, so I can't say if any other device is working better or not.

If I had a lot more time and money for more equipment I'd try to rectify this, but I don't so I'm just treating these annoyances as bugs for now and am hoping a resolution will come out soon.

zoop · #14 02-09-2006, 10:38 PM

what input are you using on the pvr150s?

AboveUnrefined · #15 02-10-2006, 03:38 PM

I'm using the coax tuner as I have straight up cable here.

laurenglenn · #16 02-15-2006, 07:36 PM

I get that even if I don't change channels on the display. The system is always set to record shows from Favorites and IR.

Here's something to try:

hdparm -a8 -c1 -d1 /dev/hda

I installed SageTV and the Gentoo OS on a separate hard drive (a 20GB) and put the video files on their own drives. It seemed to help with the corruption on top.

I plan to turn off the swap file on my P3-500 with 376MB to stop the hard drive heads from thrashing. BTW, I have 3 tuners and 2 hard drives in my system and before I put in the sole drive with the OS and Sage, that corruption happened a lot more.

Lauren

zoop · #17 02-16-2006, 07:26 AM

it doesn't really fit that it is a problem with thrashing/IO on the system since my pvr350 in the same system has never exhibited this issue. this seems to be pvr150 specific and i would really like an answer from sage as to what the problem is.

thx

/jer

laurenglenn · #18 02-16-2006, 11:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by zoop

it doesn't really fit that it is a problem with thrashing/IO on the system since my pvr350 in the same system has never exhibited this issue. this seems to be pvr150 specific and i would really like an answer from sage as to what the problem is.

thx
/jer

When I had it installed in my P4, if I ran it in KDE and started surfing the web, checking email, etc., it would cause this problem. Maybe it's not a thrashing problem, but maybe the pvr350 drivers with ivtv are more mature than the pvr150 ones and aren't as sensitive to the latency of the IO.....

It was just a suggestion, but then also Sage didn't write the ivtv driver either. Did you try the ivtv driver forum too?

Lauren

laurenglenn · #19 02-19-2006, 12:29 AM

Try adding:

"nice -n -5 "

to the lines that invoke the java files in StartSage

Lauren

AboveUnrefined · #20 02-20-2006, 06:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by laurenglenn

Try adding:

"nice -n -5 "

to the lines that invoke the java files in StartSage

implemented that now, will report on any findings... thanks!

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