And now, something totally different

[Paul H]

When I went to play back two of my latest recordings, I came across something weird, The shows played back fine, no jerks, studdering or any other problem that I've read about here. The problem was that even though the recordings were playing at the correct speed, the Sage timer was advancing 5 seconds for each second of the show, that is the time bar on the screen would advance 0 - 5 - 10 -15 -20 . . . When it got to 60 minutes the recording stopped, in real time that was about 10 minutes and only about fifth of the show was played. The effected recordings were made from different encoders.
Other recording made that night were OK.
Anyone else ever had this happen?
Any ideas what's going on?

[troycheek]

Have you tried playing the files with VLC or some other media player to see if the same timeline problems occur? Have you tried playback in SageTV with a different MPEG-2 decoder?

I've seen similar problems recently which seemed to start soon after I installed both PowerDVD and WinDVD looking for some new decoders that SageTV can use. I think it's possible that there's a conflict between the MPEG-2 decoders or among all those new processes that have shown up since the install. I uninstalled them this morning and hope to see better results when I check any new recordings when I get home tonight. (Stupid job really cuts into TV time!)

[KKnox]

This has happened to me with 2 recordings in the last 4 months, but the time bar advanced 2 seconds for each real second. Both worked fine with Windows Media Player, all of the show was there, but I could only watch the first half of each through Sage. IIRC, a fairly recent post on the forums suggested a registry edit to solve the problem, but I didn't explore it.

[CollinR]

completely different...

I wonder if your HVR1600 might have the same type of timeline issues that effected the PVR500. The symptoms seem very different as the PVR500s that have the trouble kinda bounce more randomly on the timeline and yours seems more predictable.

You might remove you other tuners from config and see if the HVR1600 is the one doing it.

[RobJ]

I have had issues like this in the past, thankfully none recently, and I have found there are 2 different problems, with similar timeline symptoms.

The first is a faulty recording, with timeline mistakes stored in the video. One of the best known sources of this type of issue is the Hauppauge 500 timeline problem, which has a registry change fix, as mentioned above. The best way to fix this kind of problem is to use the QuickStreamFix in VideoRedo. And the best way to run it is by using your choice (default SageTV or SageMC) of Video Edit plugin by Bob Phoenix.

The second problem is with SageTV's 'recognition' of the video. This is just my own theory, but it appears to me that SageTV does a quick timing analysis of any recording it picks up, and stores that timing info with the metadata of that video. This does not seem to affect most users, but for those of us with slower computers and the need to run other programs on our server, I believe that if this timing analysis occurs at the same time as a spike in CPU activity, then the timing info is thrown off. Whether this is true or not, my fix has always worked for me. I basically delete the video, then restore it, and get SageTV to pick it up again, and when I test the video, the timeline is almost always perfect, which seems to confirm that some variant of my theory is correct. By re-analyzing the video, the timeline is fixed.

Here is my method for safely removing and re-adding a video. I start my file manager, and open it to the correct folder, and select the video, ready to rename it. I open SageTV to Recordings, and locate the specific recording, ready to delete it. For absolute safety, I open Task Manager to the Network tab, and make sure that I avoid the spike of activity associated with the SageTV 5 minute recordings folder scan, wait until it has passed if it is about to occur. I then rename the video within the file manager, by adding a couple of letters or an extra extension to the end of the filename, thereby removing it from SageTV's view. I then immediately delete the video within SageTV. Since the correct filename for the video is gone, it can't actually delete any files, it can only remove the video from the list of recordings. I now rename the video back to its correct name, by removing the extra characters, and wait for the next SageTV 5 minute scan. When it has passed, the video magically re-appears in the list of recordings, and can be tested to confirm if the timeline issues were fixed.

Edit: This method requires SageTV v6 or later. With earlier versions, additional safety steps are required, such as marking the recording as Watched before deleting it, so that the Watch history will keep the recording info from being permanently removed from the database.

[Paul H]

Thanks for the info. I'll have to try it if the problem occurs again, since I deleted the affected files and watched them via the internet.