Stuttering and shows recorded by other programs and other issues

[jominor]

I recently pointed Sage to a partition on a drive using USB2. This worked with no problems. However, when I added, using the detailed setup->general settings to a new drive to Sage, shows started stuttering. This happened under 1.4 and the newest beta.

I don't think this is a USB2 problem because I ran both Snapstream and Sage for sometime pointed to this drive. I only had stuttering issues when I added the second directory. In this case, an entire 200 gig drive.

BTW, both were formatted to 64k clusterss.

For testing, I've removed the smaller partition, and now I've dedicated an entire 200 drive to Sage.

My next issue...I test both sage and snapstream. I had them both pointed to the same directory(that USB2 partition I mentioned earlier.) Shows recorded by Sage were available to Snapstream, but shows recorded by Snapstream were *not* available to sage. At least until I added that directory to the media library.

It appears that Sage tracks its recordings via an internal database instead of picking up what's in the directory. This seems consistent with the "move to library" function.

I guess I'm jumping on the bandwagon of can we have separate directories for liveTV and recorded shows. For shows that I plan to keep long term, I will probably compress them, manually, to Divx, like my DVDs. Even if I don't, I consider LiveTV more transient than Library, and would like to keep them physically separate.

One thing drive this is my desire to take 3 older drives( a 60,30,and 20 gig), combine them using XP's dynamic drive feature into a single partition and then use this as a LiveTV buffer. Then, if I want to keep the shows, I would use the "move to library" to move the show to a different drive, which would be bigger for long term storage.

Ideally, if I wanted to just blow the LiveTV partition away, I would like the freedom to do so, without affecting Media library shows.

Let's see, I've had two lookups of Sage, one spiked the CPU up to %100 and it proved to be faster to reboot the machine, than to wait it out.

Oh yeah, occasionally, the audio gets out of sync with the video. Normally, I just pause the show, the play and it returns to normal. This also seemed to happen after I split across two drives.

I'm also sending this post to Sage's bug report.

All in all, I'm still pleased with the system.

Thanks for reading