HD100 in placeshifter dropping the connection to the server

[razrsharpe]

Hey all so I've been having a problem using my hd100 in placeshifter mode at a remote location... I just submitted this to sage support but wanted to see if anyone here had any bright ideas too I apologize in advance for the long winded post... Thanks in advance.

Description:
First let me say I am not sure this is a problem with sage or not... For about the past week when using my HD100 remotely via placeshifter I have been experiencing 2 problems:

1. After initial startup/login via placeshifter when i attempt to play a previously recorded video i get the following error: "There was a Playback Error in playback. Details: sage.PlaybackException" After the error appears sage loads LiveTV and begins to playback that fine. I then stop the playback of livetv, select the recording that i want to watch, and it starts up just fine.

2. Once i get playback of the video started after a couple of minutes (2 - 4.5) the hd100 just goes blank... like it lost its connection to the server or something. This requires me to soft reboot the hd100 (toggle power to it) and start from scratch.

I can get the hd100 to not lose its connection if i toggle the OSD on/off every once in awhile (ie issuing remote commands to the hd100 keeps the connection alive).

The reason i say that these 2 problems may not be the fault of sage is because i changed the router at the location of the hd100 recently; used to be an old flaky netgear that i swapped out for the dlink dir-615. After the router changeout i began to have problems with the hd100 (all other traffic is much better with the new router). Before i had problems with normal internet traffic but the hd100 was fine. I have been through the router setup several times changing several different settings 1 at a time to see if it made a difference (QoS, MTU size, unicast DHCP, several others that i forget right now). Nothing has.

I looked through the sagetv_*.txt log files too but didnt see anything obvious except where it was doing playback and then it dumped the UI.

I also tried this without any UIMod plugins enabled... same behavior.


Reproduction steps:
1. start hd100 in placeshifter mode (remote location).
2. browse to previously record video, attempt to start playback.
3. get playback error, playback of livetv begins instead.
4. stop playback of livetv.
5. browse to same previously recorded video, attempt to start playback.
6. playback starts without issue.
7. Watch video for a couple minutes (2-4.5) without issuing remote commands and the HD100 interface goes blank, playback is stopped.
8. Soft reset (toggle power on the remote) and repeat

[razrsharpe]

So support helped me narrow down this problem... and it looks like my router is dropping the idle connection for the UI.

The first problem was actually a bug in the server code that it would not retry a failed playback start correctly. That is fixed for the next build. However, with a properly functioning network that error should only happen very very very very very rarely... In my case it was happening almost every time.

So information on what was/is happening:
The extender maintains 2 tcpip connections with the server. One for the UI and one for media playback/streaming. My router was terminating the UI connection because it thought it was idle, this would cause the extender to reboot, and the server to close the whole connection with the extender. So as a stopgap solution until i replace the router i installed toricreds timestamp / playback time on the OSD UIMod. This keeps the UI connection alive and everything is hunky dory

So moral of the story is don't know if i just got a bad dir-615 that likes to aggressively kill idle connections or if they all have that problem...