Extender issues after start TV recording playback

[starfire]

I've recently moved from Windows SageTV to Linux using the docker.

I am having problems with playback on my 2 HD300 extenders, when ever I start playing back a TV recording typically for the first 10 seconds the HD300 will not respond to any commands such as skip forward, information popup etc. it will just play the recording then suddenly jump into life and my previous button presses on the remote are all quickly executed.

I never had this issue with Windows, has anyone else come across this ? Haven't noticed anything of significance in the sagetv log so I'm a bit stumped.


Thanks.

[SomeWhatLost]

fwiw, I have noticed the same thing also on my HD200 connected to Docker Sage (stuckless needs to come up with a cool name for this... DSage? SageD?)
only seems to happen with recordings, not movies/dvd's

[starfire]

Thanks for replying, at least I'm not the only one.

I'm using the Docker under unRAID fwiw.

[stuckless]

I run sagetv on my unRAID server as well, but I haven't encountered this. I use sagetv daily and I'm usually watching a recording (but never livetv).

Since the video is playing but the sagetv controls are unresponsive... I'm wondering if perhaps the unRAID server CPU is spiking very high when sagetv is in use?

What is the hardware for you unRAID server? Since I just built mine, I made sure it was an i7 with 32gigs of memory.... mainly because I knew I'd be running SageTV, Plex, and a few other docker containers, so I wanted to make sure it was beefy enough to handle the loads.

[starfire]

Hi,

I was running Sage under a Windows VM with the same unRAID server prior to switching to your docker so if anything now there isn't a whole Windows system running it should get even more resources.

It's a quad core Intel i5 2400 with 12GB RAM:

oot@Tower:~# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         11783      11713         70          0         55       5179
-/+ buffers/cache:       6477       5305
Swap:            0          0          0

So over 5GB is in cache and available.

I've increased the priority of the Sage docker by setting my 2 other dockers to --cpu-shares=512, the default is 1024 so Sage should have plenty but I will check to see if I spot anything.

What I haven't tried is native logging yet so will give that a bash but I notice typically that sagetv log seems to give less information under Linux than it did under Windows.

[SomeWhatLost]

my CPU is Xeon E3-1231V3 and 16G ram, not a super killer system, but should be good enough? and Sage is my only running docker, and I have not figured out how to get a windows KVM running yet, so its just sage & unraid sharing CPU cycles...
and if it matters, in my case it is just plain old OTA atsc... no fancy DVB or DCT or anything...

[wnjj]

Originally Posted by SomeWhatLost

(stuckless needs to come up with a cool name for this... DSage? SageD?)

How about Dr. Sage?

[SomeWhatLost]

I could go with Dr. Sage...
But it is stuckless's creation, so naming rights are up to him.

[SomeWhatLost]

just a quick update, now that I have transferred my old unwatched v7 recordings over to my shiny new Dr Sage V9, (seriously I will watch them eventually... its only like 5TB...) all the ones I tested worked perfectly, so it seems either there is something wrong with the couple of recordings I made with V9, or there is something wrong with Thursday (when I was testing this)
or maybe the HDD I was using for temp testing of recordings (I now have moved the actual recording drives over from the V7 box) so it could be a drive thing?
all recording drives are formatted with XFS if that matters...
but my 2TB "test" drive is rather old with a lot of hours on it... enough hours that SMART thinks its geriatric...

my vote is for Thursday though... never could quite get the hang of Thursdays...

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by wnjj

How about Dr. Sage?

why not just call it SageTV? It's not any different than any of the other installs (Windows, Linux, etc).

[SomeWhatLost]

Where is the fun in that?

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

why not just call it SageTV? It's not any different than any of the other installs (Windows, Linux, etc).

This is probably rare, but I completely agree with Fuzzy.

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by starfire

I've recently moved from Windows SageTV to Linux using the docker.

I am having problems with playback on my 2 HD300 extenders, when ever I start playing back a TV recording typically for the first 10 seconds the HD300 will not respond to any commands such as skip forward, information popup etc. it will just play the recording then suddenly jump into life and my previous button presses on the remote are all quickly executed.

I never had this issue with Windows, has anyone else come across this ? Haven't noticed anything of significance in the sagetv log so I'm a bit stumped.


Thanks.

I have seen this on Windows so I don't think it is the docker causing it. Matter of fact it isn't just the first 10 seconds. I would often get spinning circles just trying to bring up the controls. Since I've switched to the 64 bit version of SageTV v9 I don't see it as often as I use to on my Windows installs.

[starfire]

Originally Posted by BobPhoenix

I have seen this on Windows so I don't think it is the docker causing it. Matter of fact it isn't just the first 10 seconds. I would often get spinning circles just trying to bring up the controls. Since I've switched to the 64 bit version of SageTV v9 I don't see it as often as I use to on my Windows installs.

No, I never had this issue under Windows, it used to work fine for me all the time every time when starting playback.

And it isn't a spinning circle and again I very rarely had that under Windows.

I think you are suffering some other issue with your setup.

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by starfire

No, I never had this issue under Windows, it used to work fine for me all the time every time when starting playback.

And it isn't a spinning circle and again I very rarely had that under Windows.

I think you are suffering some other issue with your setup.

Different but probably the same cause.

[starfire]

Still getting this problem with the latest version of Sage V9.0.9.441 and the Docker, really annoying and cannot figure out what is wrong

Family members are hitting fast forward again and again then it kicks in after x number of seconds and fast forwards 5 minutes

[Taddeusz]

Do you have drive spin down turned on in unRAID? I had to turn that off and just run the drives continuously. I was experiencing significant unwanted delays in playback. We also had at least one instance where when we started watching the news live and the video was unwatchable until the drive unRAID decided to use spun up.

[stuckless]

I know personally, I don't have any of my drives set to spin down (although I might play with that). I am using a ssd cache drive so all recordings get recorded there and then moved to the physical drive later (transparently). I've never see any playback issues, spinning circles, ff/rew issues, etc.

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by stuckless

I know personally, I don't have any of my drives set to spin down (although I might play with that). I am using a ssd cache drive so all recordings get recorded there and then moved to the physical drive later (transparently). I've never see any playback issues, spinning circles, ff/rew issues, etc.

How large of a cache drive do you have?

I have the 120GB SSD that I was using for the OS drive in my old Windows SageTV machine. I'm not sure if it would be large enough.

How many tuners do you have? Can it handle the load well?

[SomeWhatLost]

fwiw, I figured out what was causing this for me, in my case it was purely a SATA/SAS bandwidth issue.
I moved my recording drives off the SAS backplane and connected them straight to the motherboard and the weird pausing/fast forwarding/skipping thingy/non-responsiveness has completely gone away...

only issue I have left is the spinning circle of doom while scrolling through my TV shows... that is still a bit odd, will be going fine, that just sit there for a while, then all the show banners fill in and it comes back to life... it is almost like gemstone is waiting to load the show banners before allowing things to move on... which is odd because gemstone never seemed to care with V7...
even more odd is once you go through waiting for the circle of doom to do its thing, it is done... no more circles until you shut down the extender for the night and come back tomorrow.... like it loaded up a cache or something and then loses it over night...