Troubleshooting experience...

[172pilot]

Hi,

I just built a SageTV server with a cheap HP (ASUS) MoBo, P4 2.66 single core, 2 gb ram, a 250 gig boot drive and a 1tb single drive SATA for storage, formatted as 64k blocks as recommended.

I've got 2x Hauppauge 1600 dual-input cards (each has one cable, one OTA digital) and one USB HD-PVR.

For output, I'm NOT using the server, but I have 2 MVPs and one Sage HD Extender. I have only 2 extender licenses, so only 2 of the 3 will be active at max at a time - Usually it's just me playing 'till the WAF gets high enough, so presume 1 client..

Since it's a brand new system, and I wanted to test it's capabilities, I basically told it to record all things olympic, and set it on it's way. In 36 hours, it had filled the TB drive...

So, when I started watching stuff on the MVPs, I quickly found what I have seen talked about here - HD just can't be transcoded fast enough to be watchable... It's close, but it's just too darn jumpy. What I didn't expect is that even the SD stuff is unreliable, but it seems that it's not that it can't playback fast enough, it's just that sometimes it seems to go into a quasi-fastforward mode and jump around. Sometimes if I pause for a couple seconds, I can get it to play fine for a while, then it messes up again. Fast forward (smooth) isn't reliable at any speed, and doing the 10 second jumps makes it seem to "go bad" more often...

It's really hard to describe, but it seems to be that the MVP is short on processing power, but to my knowledge, there's not much it's doing, right??

My switch is a Cisco 10/100 with two gig ports on it. I have the sage server on one of the gig ports so at least it'll have bandwidth to talk to more than one 100 mbps extender at a time. I dont think the extenders are gig anyway, so that shouldn't be a problem, right??

Any idea where to look for my best improvement bang for the buck? Am I just overloading this thing w/ 5 separate tuners? Is the HDPVR exceptionally processor needy because it's USB? I'd think with it's internal encoding, that it wouldn't be, but I dont know for sure...

Should I go for a separate recorder box, with my extender boxes talking to a recorder-less front-end sage box?

Thanks in advance... Really want this to work because it's certainly a better HD option than I've got with my Tivos!


-Steve

[bcjenkins]

How does stuff look on the HD Extender ? What if you were to plug the server into a 100mb port, any difference? What version of windows, java, what speed drive?

B

[172pilot]

Thanks for the reply..

1: I'm running Server 2003, fully patched up w/ MS Update..
2: I didnt know Sage used Java, so I never installed it. If there was one installed, it got installed automatically through sage or a site I went to, so just to be sure, I downloaded the latest from SUN at java.com..
3: Things WERE looking fine on the HD extender, but now they dont seem to be, which makes me think the problem is during the recording.. At least partially.
4: The boot drive is a 5400 rpm PATA drive, but the recording drive is a WD10EACS, which is a 7200 rpm, 3gbps SATA drive w/ 16 meg cache. It is one of their new "green" drives, which makes me wonder if it may be going slow to save the environment...

I did some perfmon captures over the last couple days, and I see that it LOOKS LIKE my processor is being pegged regularly, say about every minute, then it comes right back down to like 15%... I'm wondering if that's when I am missing some content, which is causing the jerkyness..

I had been keeping up with the betas, but I just upgraded to the released 6.4 just as I am typing this, so we'll see if that helps.

If there's a specific java I should go with, please let me know!!

Thanks!!!!

-Steve

[bcjenkins]

Did you set up 64k clusters on your hard drive?

[172pilot]

Yep - Brand new quick format w/ 64k blocks... Nothing but video on that "V" drive! :-)

[Conejo]

Originally Posted by 172pilot

Hi,
HP (ASUS) MoBo, P4 2.66 single core, 2 gb ram, a 250 gig boot drive and a 1tb single drive SATA for storage, formatted as 64k blocks as recommended.

I've got an HP AMD 64 box that easily handles recording 2 SD and 2 HD streams and plays back SD to an MVP and SD/HD to a SageTV Client PC.

For output, I'm NOT using the server, but I have 2 MVPs and one Sage HD Extender. [...] So, when I started watching stuff on the MVPs, I quickly found what I have seen talked about here - HD just can't be transcoded fast enough to be watchable... It's close, but it's just too darn jumpy.

Yea, you would need a really fast duo process HD to SD realtime.

What I didn't expect is that even the SD stuff is unreliable, but it seems that it's not that it can't playback fast enough, it's just that sometimes it seems to go into a quasi-fastforward mode and jump around.

Some people can get their MVPs to work well with SD content, while others struggle and are not willing to put up with any quirks. I'm happy using my SageTV Client so my MVP sits in a box. The MVP could play and pause but I was really unhappy with FF/RW.

My switch is a Cisco 10/100 with two gig ports on it. I have the sage server on one of the gig ports so at least it'll have bandwidth to talk to more than one 100 mbps extender at a time. I dont think the extenders are gig anyway, so that shouldn't be a problem, right??

Some 10/100 devices really don't play well on gig ports, or the gig ports have inherent settings that create data-flow issues.
BCJENKINS asked if you had played with the MVP or HD100 on a standard 10/100 port? And if your HD100 viewing experience with SD/HD programing was better?

If there's a specific java I should go with, please let me know!!

The latest version for your OS should be fine.

[172pilot]

As for the gig port, I think there was a misunderstanding, or I mis-spoke...
The ONLY device on gig is my sage box, which has a real gig nic.. All my MVPs are on 10/100 ports..

A couple more data points.. One - I upgraded to the newly released code, and I have to say that my perception is that it's WAY better than even the RC just prior to the released code... Probably my imagination / coincidence, but it's working great...

I have noticed a little bit of jumpyness in the playback of HD on the MVP, but not much, and not consistently, so I decided to see what was going on while it was playing back, and I saw my processor pegged... About 85-90% on the SageTranscode process, so I guess I know what's happening!! :-)

Thanks for helping this process - I think the answer for me is going to be perhaps going to a dual or higher core CPU of at least 2ghz, and just go from there..

-Steve

[paulbeers]

There is an option to lower the video quality of the transcoding process to the MVP's (if you haven't tried it already). Within the MVP Setup there is an option to set the video to either "High" or "Standard"....the playback of HD content will not be the best, but it might just be doable on your 2.66ghz P4 for the time being while you are deciding on your upgrade path.


FYI: My Intel core2duo e4300 at 1.8ghz could not handle it, but overclocking it to 2.2ghz or better was able to handle it. Last I knew the transcoder was single threaded, so you need to have enough speed at each core in order to pull the conversion off.