SageTV Client hangs when watching recordings

[Spudman]

Just upgraded to the new v2 of SageTV and have encountered a couple of problems. The first is the slow start & slow channel change that has been mentioned elsewhere. Have tried updating various drivers & such, but haven't managed to cure it yet.

Other than the annoying delays, the server appears to work fine. However, as well as the delay, the client has a much more serious problem & hangs if I try to watch a recording. It's possible to watch 'live' TV okay, and seek back & watch a bit again, but any attempt to watch an existing recording and the client hangs & I have to kill it.

Both client & server are a Shuttle SN41G2 running WIN98SE and have the current NVidia drivers installed (unified v4.20). The server has a PVR350, but isn't currently set to use it for output.

[dgwing]

Spudman,

I too have had the same problem. All three of my kids have complained about lock up on their machines, using the clients. I also use the client and have experienced the same problem. I think that fact that I have 4 different machines (the only thing in common is Win XP Home) that I have ruled out a hardware problem.

Have you seen any potential solutions?

dgwing

[stanger89]

What kind of network are you guys running?

[Spudman]

Originally posted by stanger89
What kind of network are you guys running?

The server is on a 100Mb ethernet connection. The client is either 100Mb ethernet, or 802.11g wireless depending on where it's currently located. The hang occurs on both the wired & wireless connection. Prior to the upgrade, I'd had no problems watching recordings using the old 1.4 release.

One thing I should add is that the recording never even starts to play back. Once I click 'watch now' the client hangs & has to be killed.

[dgwing]

My home network is all CAT5 (100MB) wired for the PC's running the client & server. I also concur that I did not have any of these issues prior to loading the "official" V2 release. The Release candidates (1&2) worked fine. One difference for me, however, is that I can start to watch a show, via the client, but after only a few minutes, it hangs.
Using CTRL-ALT-DEL I can see that my PC's CPU is at 100% and that the Sage software is using 99% of it. I too have to kill the process to reset things.

BTW, Spudman, how is the thruput on the 80211G side. I have always heard that 54M was marginal for strwaming video. Prior to these issues, how was it working for you?

[jimbobuk]

i've been experiencing this quite a bit recently as well.. I've been using Sage and Sage client for a good year or so now.. i've had issues before but after the client was tightened up against lag and buffer underruns (when the client was finally setup to tolerate entire droppings of connections etc) it all seemed to pretty much go away..

It happened again last night... i manage to watch a bit more that what you guys did... say 15 mins or so, then the picture freezes.. sage client is using 99% of the CPU it is VERY unresponsive.. you can never play the video again but occasionally menus etc will pop up after 30-50 seconds of doing stuff, that'll be the high CPU usage on something else....

Any official words on this, its very annoying.. I have to kill the process (no error logs are being written out on the client machine, not checked the server), and then reluctantly open up the video i was watching directly in another player... I did notice after doing this last night that the movie stuttered a few times hinting that something was wrong buffer wise... I'd really like to have some controls in the client to control buffer sizes and perhaps get some debug info put on the HUD (% of buffer full etc) just to help us debug this... I don't know how much buffer is currently used but this isn't to try and work over a network that doesn't have enough bandwidth it just seems that some of us seem to have these intermittent spikes where something is going ary.. if we had a buffer of say 30 meg or even more (configurable) then these spikes could be worked through...

Anyways, i've been here before when i was having problems probaly about 8 months ago.. Sage got back to us and they worked on it, i'm sure they'll be doing the same soon.. the bug submissions are no longer open are they??

[Spudman]

Originally posted by dgwing
BTW, Spudman, how is the thruput on the 80211G side. I have always heard that 54M was marginal for strwaming video. Prior to these issues, how was it working for you?

With the capture settings set to CVD (1.4GB) no problems serving a single client. Checking the network status shows it's okay & there's room to spare. I thought it was 802.11b that was marginal, even at lower capture settings.

jimbobuk, not sure if it's the same problem, but I was getting some freezing watching live tv. Setting 'use_blocking_socket_for_mediaserver=false' on the server appeared to fix that.

[jimbobuk]

thanks spudman but what does that setting actually mean!? i'll do a forum search on it

[Spudman]

By pure chance, I've found that my problem appears to be related to file size. Not sure of the exact size, but the threshold appears to be about 500MB. Anything more and the client will hang immediately if I try to watch it. Also, if I watch live tv long enough & the capture file hits this limit, the client will stutter & die with 100% CPU usage. The server itself can play back the file regardless of size.

[dgwing]

Sounds like we are not the only ones who have seen this problem of "client freeze". I am considering going back to RC2 to see if that solves the problem, but do not know what effect that may have on other things....any guidance form the Frey team would be helpful at this point.

[dgwing]

Has anyone heard a solution to this problem yet?

[jimbobuk]

I am very busy with work and so haven't had time to watch much tv... last weekend i got a cheap MVP controller and i think i'll start using this more.. no Sage on it yet, and no alternative UI but when its playing the quality through tv is very good.. beats watching it on my monitor, i just lose dolby headphone sound via nvdvd..

I'll do a comparison next time i fire up my projector between it and my PC as well... to be honest the best thing is not losing my monitor to the tv, which is the normal way i watch "live" tv directly..

I'm a little dissapointed by a complete lack of any response from Sage on this.. its been over a week... then again.. there are so many forum posts on here now that they probably dont have time to keep up with every one... Here's hoping it gets fixed...

[mlbdude]

Frey does not monitor these forums actively for technical support reasons. If they notice they will gladly help but these are user forums. The way to get support from Frey is to submit a technical support request via the website.

[jimbobuk]

Thanks mlbdude, i suspected as much.. i've seen times when they have commented on stuff on here.. it just depends on their free time and what they manage to spot..

I didn't realise we could still log bugs effectively.. i'll have a go tomorrow

[mls]

I'm trying to gather data about what appears to be the same problem being discused here in another thread (hopeuflly to help support find a solution).

Could those of you having this Client lock up problem stop by there and provide the info requested (assuming you are having that same problem).

http://forums.freytechnologies.com/f...&threadid=6291

[LSHorwitz]

I too am experiencing hangs on one (but not both) of my Sage clients. Both clients are Dell 2.8 GHz 800 MHz FSB machines, both running XP Home, both using the same codecs, both on the same network. The one which hangs is a 256M RAM 875 chipset Poweredge 400SC with a Gigabit NIC made by Intel onboard. The one which does not hang uses a 1 Gig RAM and slower 100 MBit Intel Pro NIC onboard and is a Dell Dimension 4600 with an 865 chipset. I virtually never see lockups on this machine whereas the other Poweredhe 400SC locks up every time I try to start it after rebooting. After multiple attempts to rerun the Sage Client software the program eventually begins to work properly !!

These are totally stripped down machines with only an operating system and Sage Client so it keeps the software issue very simple. There is some bug in the software which is dependent on either the motherboard hardware (NIC, 875 versus 865 chipset), etc.) or the amount of RAM. I believe everything else is the same on both machines.

Ironically, I recently upgraded to this nonfunctional Poweredge 400SC from an 8 year old Dell 500 MHz PIII with 128 MB of RAM which ran the Sage Client software flawlessly. This vastly improved CPU just hangs and freezes and I have to use the Task Manager to quit Sage Client.

All of the above problem is with the version 1.4 older Client software. I see from this forum that many people are having the same type of problem with the newer version 2 software as well. I guess it could be two different issues, but my hunch is that it is an old problem which was never solved in 1.4 and now continues to be an issue in 2.0.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Larry

[glbrown]

My environment is a bit different but I was having exactly the same problem, select a show, the ui freezes, and the task needs to be killed.

For the past three weeks, I have been trying to get to the bottom of this. I must admit, sage has been running so well for months that I became lax tracking the changes I have made to the box. I added a firewire drive and have installed a few applications.

One of the apps I installed was Total Recorder which intercepts the audio stream on the pc and writes an mp3 file. Uninstalling this app fixed the problem and I am finally stable again. I just duplicated the problem by installing Total Recorder, problem immediately returns, uninstall, problem goes away.

I noticed when I was changing codecs early in this debug process, sage behavior would change with the lockups becoming sporadic but never going away. This leads me to believe that the lockups are audio related.

I hope this helps others track down the cause of this issue. I am just so happy that my sage is useable again. This is a killer app when it's running right.

-gary-

P4 2.8G on an FIC 865PE board, 1GB ram, ATI 9200
PVR 250, Videoh PCI, USBUIRT, generic firewire card
500GB internal in 3 drives, 300GB firewire drive, Plextor 708a on usb, internal generic dvd writer
2 Dishnetwork 301 receivers
XP Pro, Java 1.4.2_05, SageTV 2.0.20, Adobe Premiere, Photoshop, DVDShrink, CopyToDVD, VideoReDo
Sonic, Intervideo, and Cyberlink decoders

[Jeraden]

Just to chime in, I have the same problem. When I initially select a saved recording to watch, it hangs every single time. I kill it from task manager and reopen sage client and then it works fine. I can watch multiple saved recordings without any lockups. I haven't determined the exact amount of time I can go between watching things before I get lockups. Its at least 15 minutes, but less than a couple hours. Initially I never had the problem, but I started playing with various decoders. Currently I'm using ffdshow and sometimes wonder if that has something to do with it. I'm using nvdvd 2.0 as the underlying mpeg2 codec. When I get the lockup, I see the nvdvd icon appear in the taskbar, so it at least loads that up to start playing, but I just get a black box in the upper right corner and can't do anything except task kill it.