SageTV completely non-responsive

[aclarke]

Hi. As of last night, my sageTV installation takes 5-10 minutes to process any remote click, if it processes it at all. It's been flaky and unreliable, and I've had to redo the video source several times as when I go to watch live TV I just would get a black screen, or it wouldn't sync what I'm watching up with the guide, or a number of other problems. It's also crashed several times and had to be hard rebooted.

This XP Pro installation is only a few weeks old, and I have a 250GB hard drive formatted with NTFS (normal block size). I've been using smart recording and using the highest bitrate available (5.2GB/hr). I was using Diskeeper Pro to defragment my hard drive since I thought some of my old problems could be attributed to disk fragmentation. For the last few days, Diskeeper had my CPU (AMD 1400) pegged at 100%. My CPU temperature got up to 62 degrees, but max spec is 95 so I didn't think too much about it.

I went to plug my USB-UIRT into a USB hub last night and ended up rebooting the computer after I did that. After rebooting was when all my troubles started.

Before I redo XP AGAIN, does someone have ideas as to what might be going wrong with this?

Oh yeah, I have a couple linux servers downtairs and I wanted to use the 300GB drive in one of those as recording space. Unfortunately though, it seemed like reading/writing to those drives was too slow! I'd get j e r k y sound and picture, so I gave up on that. That's why I didn't format my drive with a larger block size; I didn't intend originally on using it as my main recording spot.

Thank you very much,
- Andrew.

[polen]

The drive at which you store your sageTV recordings needs to be formated with 64K block size. So, with a single drive you will need to partition off space for your SageTV video files.

I would remove that USB hub and plug directly into a USB port on the computer.

-Polen

[aclarke]

Originally Posted by polen

The drive at which you store your sageTV recordings needs to be formated with 64K block size. So, with a single drive you will need to partition off space for your SageTV video files.

I would remove that USB hub and plug directly into a USB port on the computer.

-Polen

OK I guess it's another reformat for me. Thanks.

I am using the USB hub because my USB-UIRT only has a range of 1-2 metres when plugged directly into the computer. The developer of the USB-UIRT suggested that it may be due to underpowered USB on my motherboard, and said that using a powered hub might solve the problem. Well, it brought my range up to ~3 metres...

Oh well,
- Andrew.

[blade]

Originally Posted by aclarke

I am using the USB hub because my USB-UIRT only has a range of 1-2 metres when plugged directly into the computer. The developer of the USB-UIRT suggested that it may be due to underpowered USB on my motherboard, and said that using a powered hub might solve the problem. Well, it brought my range up to ~3 metres...

Oh well,
- Andrew.

I use a USB-UIRT and a MCE remote and it works great from well over 30 feet away. Either your remote is weak, something is wrong with the USB-UIRT, or you have interference for the range to be so short.

As for the other problems, what version of java are you running? Make sure you are running java v1.4.2_12 or earlier. I'd definetly go with 64k recording drives and personally I never defrag mine.

[aclarke]

Java 1.5.0_06-b05 . I use this computer as my Windows server too and run a lot of other Java stuff, so I'll figure out how to run SageTV under a different jvm. After I reinstall Windows and make a separate partition for SageTV.

Also, the USB-UIRT problems have been ongoing for me. The guy who makes them suggested I try a powered hub, otherwise yeah it's probably a defective unit. I have a clear line of site to it and have tried 3 remotes with new batteries, all with the same problems. They all happen to work just fine with their respective components, so it's not the remotes that are having troubles.

Once I get the computer back up and running properly, I'll see if I'm still having trouble with the USB-UIRT with the powered hub.

Thanks again,
- Andrew.