dropouts and then new mpg files

[muernst]

Hallo,
I am very happy with SageTV. It has the best quality I have seen.
But I recognized one thing that is not working for me. I have SageTV programmed to record some shows. Every third (or fourth) show there is a problem with some dropouts. The dropouts are coming oftener. The dropouts never stops. Then after a while SageTV stops recording to the file (ending with 0) and records to a new file (ending with 1). So I believe there is a problem with recording. I searched here in the forum but that is not the stuttering I found. I have installed the newest beta version (v2.2.6 RC beta). I use the SageTVService. Any thoughts?
Thank you. Ernst.

[JasonJoel]

That can be caused by many things... Hard drive issues (throughput interruptions, overtaxing the drive with too many programs reading/writing to it, etc), machine issues (PCI bus saturated, poorly written drivers or chipset causing PCI throughput interruptions).

It is always a system issue though, not a Sage issue.

You could try a few things:
1. Insure HD is formatted with 64K clusters (you can search on these forums for more information on that)
2. Defrag the HD
3. Update your system drivers. For instance if you have a VIA chipset go get the latest VIA Hyperion drivers, etc.
4. Insure the HD is running in DMA mode and not PIO mode.
5. Store recordings on a separte dedicated HD, not on the system HD
6. Buy faster HD or more compatible motherboard if all else fails

Hope that gets you pointed in the right direction.

JasonJoel

[muernst]

Hallo,
thank you for your help.
Is this your or others experience?
It occurres not every time. So one of four times. And when it happens it happens after half an hour for 15 minutes. Then SageTV records to another file. And always are the same conditions. I think when it depends from the HDD or the drivers the effect must be oftener. Or am I wrong?
Ernst

[muernst]

One more I recognized. I started with the 2.1.10 version and the same problems are very often. And 3 or 4 times for the same video. After I started with the newest beta it was better. First I thought the effect has gone.

[teedublu]

could also be your capture card (driver or hardware).
some are having "tune" problems with PVR150 (probably affects PVR500), which is probably a driver issue.
You need to look at the log file to get some clues.

TW

[byopvr]

FWIW: I've had what I think is the same issue. (PVR350, via m10k) It started AFTER I upgraded to 2.2.x beta (all the way up to the current 2.2.6RC).

I couldn't "make" it happen, but it did it with increasing frequency... along the way I tried the following, to no avail.

reformated as NTFS/64k clusters, drive is in UDMA mode, latest 4-in-1 drivers loaded... latest pvr350 drivers, recordings are on the same physical drive as the OS (different partition...) I don't believe it to be a hard disk physical speed issue though, that I can tell. Updated JRE to 1.5u1, changed some thread priority registry tweaks... I also added a pci slot fan/blower to cool the pvr350.

I ended up rolling back to the latest full/regular non-beta release which seems to have alleviated my symptoms (for now *knock on wood*.

here's a post in the beta forum posted more about my issue here, although I have slightly different symptoms than AWS (my mpeg file would break up into multiple chunks)...

So, it sounds like you have a similiar issue that I did... except my issue alleviated when reverting Sage back.

rampy