Newbie Woes

[jgourd]

I am switching from BeyondTV to Sage. The switch hasn't been easy.

I have two HDHomeruns and they work perfectly on my BTV server and they work perfectly on my Sage server if I use the HDHomerun setup app and VLC to watch them. I have the latest firmware / software for everything.

Last night after much fighting I was able to get all four tuners from the HDHomeruns to work with Sage. This morning, none of them were working. Using the channel setup for each tuner I verified none of them could get a signal. I removed all the tuners and added them back. They only work sporadically. When they do work the audio stutters as well as the picture. I doesn't matter which source I try to watch, it stutters. Yes, all my files systems are formatted with 64K clusters.

I have't spend any money on this yet but I plan to buy the sage server, a few client licences, and two media extenders. I can't in good conscience, spend a dime until I can make it work properly. The odd thing is that I had it working very well the night before and changed nothing overnight.

So if anyone has some sage advice on what to look for and where to look I would appreciate it.

[Opus4]

I would check the power supplies on the HDHRs -- the SiliconDust forum & website (trouble ticket page) have info on what to look for to see if you have the bad power supplies. I think they have a list of some other things to check, such as removing the ZoneAlarm firewall.

- Andy

[jgourd]

I had already replaced the power supplies of the HDHRs at my own expense.

I believe that I have sorted out what the problem is. Flaky network! After much moving cables and such I discovered that if I connect the main Ethernet coming into the room directly to the machine it is perfect. All HDHRs work every time through Sage. Sage even plays the files stored on my Drobo / Droboshare just fine.

By process of elimination it looked like either the switvh in the room with the machine or its ethernet cable. I swapped the switch, no fix. I swapped the cable, no fix. I swapped ethernet jacks on the machine, no fix. I locked the link speed to 100/FULL, no fix. I put everything back and it is now working. For how long I do not know.

My plan to fix it permanently is to do away with the switch and just run the cable from the backbone switch into the machine. I can do this when I retire the BeyondTV server. In the mean time, if it goes flaky again I'll just pull another run of CAT 6 from the backbone switch and connect both the BTV server and the Sage server directly to the backbone.

BTW the BTV server never had a problem while connected to the switch, it was only the Sage machine, both of its NICs.

So off I go to buy the Sage license bundle with the HD-DVR and a media extender. Oh happy day!

[jgourd]

This is getting weirder by the hour. After I got the networking all working properly I actually used Sage and it was a pleasure. After switching to the Cyberlink MPEG decoder on my Sage Client machine I got perfect, smooth playback of HD recordings. Yeah.

This morning I couldn't connect to the server, I checked and it was back to stuttering while watching live content streaming from the HDHRs. I bypassed the switch and it still stuttered. Network infrastructure has been ruled out. Since last time no amount of network infrastructure tinkering actually fixed the problem, I just power cycled the machine and it was working again.

So now the question is: What is going on in the dead of night that is making both NICS do this?

[Shield]

Standby mode on the pc?

[jgourd]

Nope. Prior to installing Sage, when it was just a BTVLink machine, I had it going into Standby all the time and never had an issue. Since installing the Sage server on the machine I disabled standby on the power profile.

[jgourd]

I found the problem. I mean I was able to see, identify, and correct a real problem and all Sage Weirdness has gone away as a result.

After the network issue resurfaced on Sunday I found out from the Task Manager that the NICs, (both of them) on the motherboard were only connecting to the network at 10mbits. I disabled both on the motherboard and popped a new 1 Gbit card I had in the closet and it auto-negociated to 100/Full. I force the connection to 1Gbits and it connected and maintained the 1Gbit connection for 24 hours now. It appears that 10mbits is just enough to watch HDTV on BeyondTV.

Sage is working flawlessly with just the HDHR tuners. I can't wait until I get the HD-PVR delivered and hooked up. 1080p MKVs playback very smooth from the Droboshare but for some reason the AC-3 isn't getting to the HiFi Receiver although it is when I watch MPGs and AVIs with an AC-3 soundtrack. I even bought a Mac client and it works great too.