Long Delayed Pauses

[jptaz]

Originally Posted by mls

The reverse question could also be asked here as to why you actually need to alter that setting while many others (including myself) do not have a problem with it running at the default? There is something else involved here that maybe should be corrected.

mls,

Do you use the PC SageTV is on for anything other than running SageTV? Do you serve client PCs on in it? I use my SageTV PC as my office computer and now serve 2 clients off it and will be serving 2 additonaly MVPS soon.

I am by far not alone in the use of a bigger disk buffer and 2MB is pretty smal for streaming video. This works out to less than 2 seconds of buffering for me. Many people with wireless have found this gets rid of all stuttering.

If you have a slower disk drive or as has been pointed out to me a via chipset that does a bad job with PCI traffic then you are making lots of slow accesses all over the disk and that 2 seonds can get chewed up quickly.

Maybe those of us who have VIA based motherboards or older slower drives should throw away our computers and get new ones or replace all those perfectly good components, but I didn't start using PC based PVRs to invest in lots of expensive equipment. I have not bought and entirely new PC in over ten years. I only replace a few components at a time and they have to provide me with significant benefit to be worth the investment to me. I am considering getting a new 200GB drive, but it seems silly to get rid of the my esiting three 80 GB drives that still work just fine as long as I dedicate 32 MB of memory to video buffering ( disk buffering what ever you want call it).

I agree the problem should be corrected, but unless they start changing more of the ineffiecent Java code to C++ nothing will change and we will have to live with work arounds. Mainly the stupid brute force recordings and Video import directory verifcation. I can not import my MP3s because every 5 minutes SageTV uses 100% for several seconds checking if I adding any more media files. I could write a C++ plugin for SageTV that would use a fraction of that CPU and could report additions and deletions to SageTV much sooner. I only have 9,707 MP3s using about 42GB of space. I consider this a small library compared to many and there is no reason that SageTV should check every 5 minutes if any of those files has been deleted or a new one has been added. According to File Monitor none these files are evening being opened or read, but just a simple query as to its existence and maybe its basic file information (size and other attributes).

John

[mls]

Originally Posted by jptaz

Do you use the PC SageTV is on for anything other than running SageTV? Do you serve client PCs on in it? I use my SageTV PC as my office computer and now serve 2 clients off it and will be serving 2 additonaly MVPS soon.

I have 4 tuners on the server and one other client machine. Back with v2.0 I tested once with all 4 tuners recording, playing back a video on the server, playing back with a client on the server machine, and also with the other client machine playing back. I didn't experience any problems in that usage, but I haven't tried stress testing v2.1 with that full load (yet). However, I do have a feeling it will not perform as well as v.20 did.

Since I live alone, normally I wouldn't have the client(s) running, I'd be using either the server or the client, not both at the same time (although sometimes play with the extra client on the server for PiP, but very seldom).

So, in more normal usage, then I do also surf the web while watching things with SageTV on the secondary TV out of my vid card. Sometimes also editing or printing things or reading .pdf files. There are rare instances such as when opening a large .pdf were I do get some slight amount of stutter in the playback, but that is to be expected if I start hogging CPU cycles away from SageTV. And that's only a very short period of a few seconds even at that.

In my more normal usage of SageTV as just a PVR I don't have any of those problems (just lucky I guess).

I do however agree with your other comments. JAVA really is not the best way to be doing things. Also, I don't really understand why it needs to be rescanning all the directories for new or deleted files either. I could see it for only it's own recordings, but since there is an option to rescan the others manually one would think SageTV shouldn't have to bother with those.

BTW: I wasn't saying the buffer setting changes shouldn't be done. If it helps those with problems that's great. All I was trying to do is point out that there are other things to be considered as well as several things that should be looked into and/or fixed with SageTV. Also, for whatever reason, it seems like v2.1 has a number of issues that were not causing as many problems back in v2.0.

I also suspect that if SageTV were converted from JAVA over to C programming a number of these problems might actually disappear since JAVA is rather sluggish and combersome.

[remmy925]

I have noticed something similar myself. Every now and then I get pauses. This wasnt a problem before I moved to 2.1. When they have been happening I am usualy watching tv and doing something else at the same time. Wasnt a problem before, but it is now. I have noticed comskip running at most of those times. I noticed I had comskip to run while awake. I have turned off that feature and am currently testing to make sure things are good. Do you think that maybe you have set something up similar on your own PC Cayars?

[Cayars]

Nope remmy925, it's not ComSkip or any other program/service doing it.

[lovingHDTV]

I noticed this problem after installing v2.1 also. I never watch on my server, don't even have a monitor hooked up to it. I don't run comskip when recording. I have 100Mb wired network connection.

I do however, get pauses that last from 5-15seconds. It happens often enough that I don't do anything anymore but wait. It always comes back. It is very annoying and disruptive.

[Pumpkinhead]

I just get intermittent jitter (sometimes almost none for extended periods), processor utilization is very low, compskip is'nt even in the equation, and I dont get any pauses for more than about 1/30th of a second.

[Cayars]

I "solved my problem" for the time being.

Here is what I did:
http://forums.freytechnologies.com/f...1&postcount=21

Carlo

[rsagetv99]

I am having the same problem so I wanted to try Carlo's fix.

I found a downloadable copy of 2.1.9 RC6 I think it was, but I cannot find 2.0.20. Where can I find this?

[DFA]

As time has gone on, I am finding a number of stability type issues and PQ problems that I did not have before. I am beginning to be able to duplicate or have seen at least once, many of the things people have been posting about. Most of these observations are for "Live TV".

For example, I found that when I unloaded nVidia 4.0 codecs and loaded NV 3.0 codecs, I can duplicate the "crashing Sage" problem when trying to open the nVidia applet. This did not happen with NV 3.0 and Sage 2.0.20.

I find that my video codec choice in Sage does not always "stick"; particularly if I've done any type of edits of the sage.properties files.

Also, very strange the way Sage freaks out if I open Girder and start moving through the "settings\plugins" dialog. I had USB-UIRT disabled because I have been using my built-in IRMan. When I enabled the USB-UIRT plugin for Girder, the audio and video began falling all over itself.

I have been starting to show A/V sync issues and dropped frames of varying severity. Cycling Sage through sleep or restarting altogether brings things back. That and resetting my video codec selection that has changed. I also found that I have better stability if I leave the Girder USB-UIRT plugin disabled. Sage has direct access to USB-UIRT for changing STB channels so I do not require UIRT functionality in Girder since I have IRMan as optional IR detector / receiver.

I am trying many things to see if I can find some common denominator. Right now I am back to NV 3.0 codecs and running w/o the new Sage Service.

I am in love with the new built-in Sage wake feature and would hate to lose it but seriously considering dropping back to 2.0.20 and also living w/o the new great STV's Cayars and mlbdude and others are producing.

There is something not quite right and I'm not sure if it is Sage, nVidia codecs or even something to do with Girder and USB-UIRT. Not an entirly happy marriage at the moment it seems to me.

I should probably forward some of the error logs to Sage for review.

EDIT: Occassionally, I sometimes am getting an error message that says something to the effect that 'a suitable encoder could not be found' when Sage is started. This requires that I restart Sage or reboot. This is also a new thing first observed with 2.1.

DFA

[Cayars]

Originally Posted by rsagetv99

I am having the same problem so I wanted to try Carlo's fix.

I found a downloadable copy of 2.1.9 RC6 I think it was, but I cannot find 2.0.20. Where can I find this?

Try http://download.sage.tv/SageTV_V2_0_20Setup.exe

[hoep]

Cayars,
your fix fixed also my problems with the distorted sound. Thanks for your advice.
regards
hoep

[Cayars]

Glad it worked for you.

[Deadbolt]

Can someone post a link to release candidate 2.1.9? Thanks!

[mls]

Originally Posted by Deadbolt

Can someone post a link to release candidate 2.1.9? Thanks!

This one might still work http://download.sage.tv/SageTV_V2_1_9RC6Setup.exe