HD Extender locks up on occasion?

[gplasky]

I saw it when I was watching a HD recording on the HD Extender and the wife was watching a SD recording on a PC client. I think a HD recording was also going on. Not sure if comskip had kicked off. And I'm pretty sure I reported this bug previously. But I will report it again.


Gerry

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by carlgar

Tmiranda, Have you reported to Sage? Support says I am the only one report these random type lockups. Because of that they think it is a hardware. I can't argue that it's not if it is not getting reported.

Not yet. I've only recently updated the firmware and just started to see the problem so I was not sure if it was a coincidence or not.

I'll turn on logging and report the bug once I get a usable logfile.

[Stuntman]

Is the unit in an area that doesn't get much ventilation? Lock ups occur frequently with devices that get too hot.. having said that, I too have a unit that locks up on occasion.. the thing is that my mvp's continue to play even as my HD extender remains frozen.

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by Stuntman

Is the unit in an area that doesn't get much ventilation? Lock ups occur frequently with devices that get too hot.. having said that, I too have a unit that locks up on occasion.. the thing is that my mvp's continue to play even as my HD extender remains frozen.

I don't think it's possible for the HD100 to get hot. It just burns too little power. Maybe outside on a sunny day, etc...

[mikesm]

PS An interesting experiment would be to break the network path between the server and the HD100 during playback, and see if it locked up. Not just yanking the cable that would take the interface down, but maybe plugging it and the server into a switch, and unplugging the server during playback.

I suspect the HD100 might not be robust if the server gets unresponsive for a bit in the middle of a streaming operation. These sorts of bugs are common in this sort of device. If the server gets busy and can't feed it enough data to keep the codec busy, I wonder if that causes a lockup than an error.

[carlgar]

I have been running with direct debug output from the extender for the last several days. I have seen the hang occur 2 times in this mode and it appears to be just a random hang. The HD extender is non responsive to the network at least for a few minutes. For me it looked like a network issue because the extender did not ACK a packet which caused VISTA to resend it. This showed up in the log as the VISTA TCP stack issue. It looks like the HD extender is in a wait state for an event that will not occur. You should be able to use the remote power button to power off and back on. I had been using to switch to power off and back on but this appears to be unneeded.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by carlgar

I have been running with direct debug output from the extender for the last several days. I have seen the hang occur 2 times in this mode and it appears to be just a random hang. The HD extender is non responsive to the network at least for a few minutes. For me it looked like a network issue because the extender did not ACK a packet which caused VISTA to resend it. This showed up in the log as the VISTA TCP stack issue. It looks like the HD extender is in a wait state for an event that will not occur. You should be able to use the remote power button to power off and back on. I had been using to switch to power off and back on but this appears to be unneeded.

I don't know about that. Mine was unresponsive to everything including the remote. It was a total lockup and could only be fixed by a hard power off from the back switch. The remote light on the HD box stops responding.

Gerry

[carlgar]

Did you try the power key? My understanding is that the power key is the only key that is handled locally by the extender. I think when the hang occurs could affect this. Before I started watching the hangs in detail, I encountered one with the IR light on. If the hang occurs in this state, it makes sense to me that it would not be able to see new IR input. I think that is the type of hang that caused me to start using the switch on the back.

[Narflex]

Originally Posted by carlgar

Did you try the power key? My understanding is that the power key is the only key that is handled locally by the extender. I think when the hang occurs could affect this. Before I started watching the hangs in detail, I encountered one with the IR light on. If the hang occurs in this state, it makes sense to me that it would not be able to see new IR input. I think that is the type of hang that caused me to start using the switch on the back.

This piece of information is VERY useful. If the extender locks up on you; then see if you can recover it by just using the power button on the remote control or the standby button on the front panel. If those get no response; then use the power switch on the back. This'll help use get better information on what may be different problems.

One thing that can happen for sure is that overheating can lock it up. Now the extender on its own will not overheat; it just doesn't consume enough power. BUT another device next to it that is generating heat can cause it to lockup. I had this happen myself w/ one of the prototype units (although it used a different case). If I left my Wii on in Standby mode; the extender would lock up every now and then. This only lasted a few days because I realized what had changed in my setup. The Wii was right next to it in an enclosed cabinet and was quite warm to the touch; and that heat radiated to the extender which caused it to overheat and lockup.

I should put my Wii back into Standby mode to see if I can get the current extender HW to lock up on me.

[HawgGuy]

I recently starting seeing random freeze. running 6.3.10 beta and latest java. The lockups were while watching live SD from my r5000. I just assumed that it was some bit of wonkiness with the r5000.

The extender was not locked up as I can use the remote to stop and restart the program (I think I had to change the channel and then go back to the original to resume watching).

Seems more common since the move to 6.3.10, not sure. I was planing to downgrade to 6.3.9 as a test.

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by gplasky

I don't know about that. Mine was unresponsive to everything including the remote. It was a total lockup and could only be fixed by a hard power off from the back switch. The remote light on the HD box stops responding.

Gerry

Same here. No buttons work at all including the power button.

I've turned on debug logging but my unit has not locked up yet, when (if) it does I will send the logfile.

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

Same here. No buttons work at all including the power button.

I've turned on debug logging but my unit has not locked up yet, when (if) it does I will send the logfile.

Yeah, at least one of the lockups I had also borked over the front panel power button. I had to powercycle it to get it back up and running.

[JustinWI]

Just got my extender and have been experiencing the same thing. My MVP has been working for at least a week with no issues.
I had it happen twice in 10 minutes on two different movies. They are DVDRips (Just shrunk to 4.7), so they are standard MPEG2, nothing special.
I am running the video over HDMI and the audio over SPIDF. I can tell when the freeze is going to happen because the network link stops blinking and then about 20 seconds later everything freezes. A hard boot is required to bring it back.
If I press a button on the remote in the frozen state, the IR and Network lights blink when the button is depressed.
I am running sage on a headless XP SP2, P4 1.7 with 256MB of RAM. Not optimal but it was a spare box I had, plus it does go above the minimum specs.
I don't have debugging turned on so I can't provide any extra info at this time.

[cvitech]

Recieved my HD Extender. Hookup was pretty straight forward. I did an upgrade to 6.3.10 last weekend. The response of the unit is great. Was suprised on how long the firmware update takes. Things were looking good until I started using it. It seems it takes about 10 minutes and the unit locked up. I did notice the network activity light just quicks and within about 20 secs it will lock up. I have experenced where I have to power the unit completely off and or I can use the power button on the remote. If the remote works, I have to wait about a minute before I can turn it on. Watched a DVD with the wife and I must have reset it 10 times. The wife was laughing the whole time.... With that in mind I unistalled SageTV completely off of my server and reinstalled everything from scratch. Updated Java to latest version (1.65?). It was at 1.63? before update. Installed all plugins that I use. Since the complete redo, the unit has not locked up once. Go figure. Keep in mind that it has only been running for a full day. I have watched a dvd, tv recoding and live tv. I guess now is to see what the long term issues will be.

[electron]

I had my first lockup occur tonight. No buttons responded, including the power button. Activity light was lit up solid, and the only fix was to do a hard reset. I was playing back a HD based DVD (no encryption), but I did install 6.3.10 today, which installed java 1.6 (and the java updater installed an update for 1.6 afterwards). This was the first video playback since I installed the update, so not sure if this is related.

[mistergq]

At first, one of my boxes would look up pretty often. I had swapped out the ethernet cable, and that seemed to fix it. But I just had another lookup. So I don't know.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by electron

I had my first lockup occur tonight. No buttons responded, including the power button. Activity light was lit up solid, and the only fix was to do a hard reset. I was playing back a HD based DVD (no encryption), but I did install 6.3.10 today, which installed java 1.6 (and the java updater installed an update for 1.6 afterwards). This was the first video playback since I installed the update, so not sure if this is related.

If it updated your java for you make sure to go into add/remove programs and uninstall the older version. By default java leaves the previous versions in place.

Gerry

[electron]

I removed 1.4, the add/remove software control panel shows "Java (TM) 6 Update 4 (137MB)" and "Java (TM) 6 Update 5 (114MB)". Do I remove update 4 as well (eventho update 5 is smaller than 4)?

[gplasky]

Yes-just keep the latest update. (5).

Gerry

[hemicuda]

When mine locks it's totally unresponsive. Hard reset is all that works. I've seen it drive the service to 100% cpu as well sometimes.