Problem watching same show live on two machines

[fventura]

I am having a stutterring problem but only when I attempt to watch the same program on a Sageclient machine that is being watched on the SageTV machine. Video/Audio quality is fine in any other scenario.

My setup is as follows.

SageTV(WinXP Pro/XP2700+/512MB) is in my family room where we watch most often. It has two pvr250 (v16) cards connected to two two directv receivers. The recordings are being saved to a server upstairs (Win2kpro/XP2700/512MB/3ware Raid5/NTFS64k). In the bedroom I have a Sageclient (WinXPpro/P4-2.6/512MB). All connections are 100Mbps but as it's an old house the cabling goes back to three different switches throughout the house.

I was recording at Mpeg max quality 5.25g and just lowered it to Best (3.25g) to no avail.

Should I be able to watch the same show on both machines?

Is this configuration ok? Specifically, saving the recordings to another server? I'm also going to add another network encoder in the home theater soon so there will be more bandwidth being chewed up. Doing the math though it seems like the network should handle it even if I am limited to a single uplink cable between switches...

I've considerred running SageTV on the server with the Raid5 disks but I would then have to run more network encoders as I don't have cabling for more than one DirecTV receiver in the office with the server and I don't want to server down in the living room. Are there any benefits to either configuration besides the costs of the SageRecorders? Which is the more recommended configuration??

Sorry for so many questions...Thanks!

[JasonJoel]

I had various isues doing a similar thing....

Although from a technical sense there should be enough network bandwith, it doesn't seem to work quite that way. From a technical standpoint, it should only be (5.25 * 8 / 60 / 60) * 3 * 1000 = 35 Mbit/s from the actual Sage TV machine. Should be doable, right? I get >50 Mbit/s sustained from one source off my server all the time...

Well, I've had issues doing it too... And not only with Sage TV, other programs too. When I had my main storage on a remote machine from my Sage TV machine, I always had stuttering problems with >2 people watching. Never could figure out why. Network util was low, CPU % was low, no real explaination.

After that I moved the storage to my actual Sage TV machine. Now, I watch Live TV in up to *3* places at once with no issues.

I truely believe this is a networking overhead/throughput issue (regardless of raw throughput specs) and not a Sage TV issue.

Obviously if the storage was all in the Sage TV server, your network loading would be 1/3 what they are now. So if it is a network issue, then putting the storage in your actual Sage TV server would fix it.

UNLESS of course you HAVE to use network encoders like you are saying... Then the network loading would not go down (actually may go UP), and it wouldn't help anything if it is really network issues.

In that case, I would focus on making sure I had very good network cards and switches. aka no 'on-board/built in' network adapters (as they are usually higher CPU, less efficient network throughput). Maybe would even think of gigabit.. but that gets expensive fast.

Jason

[stanger89]

Yeah sounds like a networking issue you've got 12Mbps to the server and 24Mbps from the server, the simultaneous to/from could be causing more problems than a strait 36Mbps. You might want to consider running Gigabit to from the switch to the RAID server, that should give you more than enough bandwith on the server side.

Just curious, what chipset is in the RAID server? My 3ware ran like crap in my VIA based Athlon board, it's about 10x faster in my P4 board, so it could be a bandwidth problem inside the server. VIA has had pathetic PCI implimentation (look at sudhian forums) and nforce boards had problems also (search PCI write at nforcershq).

[ErsatzTom]

Actually, it is probably 24 both ways. The server almost certainly has the file open twice, once for local viewing and once to push out to the client. Have you checked to make sure that all of your ethernet interfaces are running full duplex? If you are going to write to a network drive, I would second the recommendation to get the file and sage servers on gigabit ethernet. On the other hand, I should think that full duplex 100mb ethernet should be able to handle two viewers and a network file server. You should check and see how many collisions you are getting, if you are getting dropped packets, etc.

t

[fventura]

Thanks guys that is one thing I can take a closer look into.
However is this something you would expect to see manifest itself only when watching the same show? If the two machines watch seperate shows, one off of each tuner...no stutter.

It seems to me the network load is the same in both instances and then becomes an issue of two clients accessing the same file. ? Am I off base here?

The 3ware board is running on an nforce2 board Asus a7n8x-deluxe. The sage server is on nforce2 also Asus A7n8x-X.

Thx again!

[robogeek]

Originally posted by fventura
Thanks guys that is one thing I can take a closer look into.
However is this something you would expect to see manifest itself only when watching the same show? If the two machines watch seperate shows, one off of each tuner...no stutter.

It seems to me the network load is the same in both instances and then becomes an issue of two clients accessing the same file. ? Am I off base here?

The 3ware board is running on an nforce2 board Asus a7n8x-deluxe. The sage server is on nforce2 also Asus A7n8x-X.

Thx again!

This is interesting. I got to thinking about this and I would have to say that if this turns out to be a networking issue, the best way around it would be to have your SageTV, tuners, and storage all in one PC. Given the fact it only happens with that one scenario you described would lead me to believe there is a problem with the Win2K handling of large files over the network or possibly something going wrong with the Win2K RAID drivers. But I would bump the bit rate for the recordings down to Good (1.5Gb) or maybe even lower and test it again, just for the sake of seeing if it really is a network issue. If it stops stuttering or stutters less at lower bit rates, it's probably a network problem. If it doesn't stop stuttering...who knows.

When I really got to thinking about this, I reallized just how much network traffic your setup is generating... SageTV (Computer A) with 2 tuners streaming it's recordings to a storage server (Computer B). That's 2 streams between A and B. Now switch to Live TV on Computer A and you add one more stream...even though it's live TV it adds another stream because SageTV has to open the file from Computer B to display it since it doesn't display it direct from the tuner card. To keep track, we're at 3 streams of data between Computer A and B.

Now throw in a client (Computer C) which requests a show from SageTV Server on Computer B which has to request the show from the storage server Computer A which adds 1 more stream between Computer A and B, PLUS it adds a stream between B and C.

That leaves us with 4 streams of data going between the Storage Server and the SageTV Server, and yet 1 additional stream of data going between the SageTV Server to the Client...and that's not counting anything else that might be generating network traffic (broadband Internet, streaming MP3's, Windows overhead, SageTV/Client overhead, etc.) That's a lot of network traffic no matter what bit rate you're recording at

[fventura]

I think I found the cause thanks to the direction here.

I did a little testing last night.

I put the quality back to 5.6gb/hour and setup perfmon to look at CPU and network to see what was going on on the SageTV machine. Here's what I found:

With two streams recording I am sending about 12-13Mbps to the network storage server. Watching a show on both machines causes two streams of equal size to be received by the SageTV machine from the storage machine but an additional 12Mbps stream to be sent to the sage client. So I have a total of 24Mbps received and 36Mbps transmitted from the sage server.

CPU 40-50% with some peaks of 62%. Applied the Hauppauge registry tweaks and cpu dropped down to around 25%.

With a more thorough evaluation the stutterring existed with two machines watching live shows no matter which tuner it was on.

All NICs are forced to 100Mbps Full Duplex, however taking a closer look at the cheap switches the only one not negotiating to 100full is of course the SageTV machine. Tons of collisions. I tried my laptop on the same drop and it links up 100Full no problem so I suspect the on board NIC. It's an nforce and has the latest drivers so I'm going to pickup a PCI nic today and lunch and install it tonight. (I feel silly missing this as that's what I do for a living , oh well). I'm pretty sure that this will fix this problem.

However, while troubleshooting this. Changing duplex settings trying to force 100 full, disabling, re-enabling the NIC, trying the other onboard nic, somehow I lost all my sage recordings and my favorites from Sage? They are still on the network drive and the settings still point there however they where gone..

I took a chance and renamed my wiz.bak to wiz.bin and restarted sagetv.exe and they came back. Any idea what that's all about??

Thx for the help!

[justme]

somehow I lost all my sage recordings and my favorites from Sage? They are still on the network drive and the settings still point there however they where gone..

Oh yeah Very common problem with network setups. It's also a big pain for the rest of us too. What happens is that Sage stores all the Metadata for a recorded show in the Wiz.bin file. When it doesn't see a file where it knows one was it deletes all of the metadata(not the files themselves) for that file from the Wiz.bin. Then depending on your setup they can be moved to different areas. ie the library or errant folder
You did the best thing you can do right now, by immediately restoring from your Wiz.bak. If you had started SageTV one more time then even this would not have worked.

Lots of threads around here about this issue. This is just one of the most recent I found in a very quick search. Jeff's aware of it and hopefully it will be addressed in Sage2. If not I know several people who would like to talk to him about it. Seriously for now what you did is the best except occasionally backing up the Wiz in incremental dated versions in a different location. That way you can at least restore you older recording's metadata and only lose what was recorded since the last Wiz backup.

[fventura]

Thanks Justme.

I guess I didn't get it quite enough in time as I only seem to have my library. Oh well only a couple of days lost. I am glad I know of this issue now so I can add the Wiz.bin to a backup schedule. Is that the only critical file for the DB? I am going to get the properties file also.

[fventura]

UPDate.

I added a 10/100 nic and forced it to 100full. Linked up and now no collisions. Still stutterred though. Dropped the quality to 3.x GB/hour and now the stutterring is gone. Unless I do anything, and I mean anything, on the SageTV machine.

So, I think I am going to try to add another coax cable to my office where my storage server is and move the two tuners there and run sage TV on the same machine as the storage. Unfortunately this means I need to buy sage recorders and additional sage clients. I guess that's cheaper than upgrading this to gigabit though...

[fventura]

I just realized I said I needed to buy sage recorders in my previous post...Don't want to confuse anyone. In the config I described they're not needed.

I'm going to add a third tuner on another TV(which would have made my stutterring issue even worse in the current config)... So SageRecorder would have been needed in either configuration so I had Sage Recorder on the brain...oops )