Recording over Firewire issue

[chrise2]

So, I finally got recording over firewire working properly with SGraphRecorder and my HD cablebox. It works great except I can't use it to watch live HD over firewire or watch a show while its recording. I can only record a show and watch it after its done recording. Which is way better than nothing, I just wanted to know if this is just how it is or if there's a solution. I'm still waiting for my IR blaster to come in the mail so I'm not doing any channel changing yet.

-Eric

[eobiont]

Me, I can watch the show for about 15-20 mi8nutes and then it freezes up anf nothing can unfreeze it. I have to go watch something else until it is done recording . In some cases the recorded show just vanishes.

It is not necessarily just HDTV that does this, It can be any show recorded with SGraphRecorder - SDTV too.

[Naylia]

EOB-

How much RAM do you have? I noticed that using the Sgraphrecorder I really am pushing the boundaries of my 256 MB and am adding more this week in hopes of alleviating the problem.

[chrise2]

I have a P4 3.4GHz with 1GB RAM. It says there was a problem accessing the filesystem for playback. I'm NOT running the service.

[Naylia]

I think that rules out RAM limitations as the culprit. Have you tired a different version of Sage?

[eobiont]

Have an Optiplex GX270 2.8MHz with 512M RAM.

Are you not seeing problems with watching in progress recordings via SGraphRecorder at all? I get about a third of the way into a 1hr show and the picture freezes. Or plays just a little bit, blllt........bllllt.........bllllt. 1/2 second every 2-3 seconds. Sometimes the picture will move really fast to catch up and then continue playing normally. Sometimes the screen just goes black and then rewinding results in the video equivilent of a scratched CD. 1/4 second clip playing over and over again in quick succession.

This happens about one quarter of the times I try to watch something that is also recording.

When this happens, my drive light is pegged. I wonder if there is some background process that's killing me. Time to try and exclude that directory from virus scanning I think.

[chrise2]

I can't watch live TV or something that's recording at all. I get the can't access file system error. Stinks. As far as performance goes, 720p stuff plays fine. 1080i stuff plays choppy. Is there any way to improve performance?

[DFA]

Is there any way to improve performance?

Spend money!

I am not experiencing these issues. Others have reported the inability to simultaneously watch and record (i.e., Live TV) HDTV. I think this may be indicative of some kind of a system bottleneck; HDD and/or subsystem in my opinion.

I run a pair of SATA Raid-0 drives in addition to my OS / Apps drive and seem to be OK for Live TV when HDD data rates are highest. The rest of my rig is just an AMD 2600+ (mobile, OC'd to 2500 GHz) and 400 MHz FSB. I am using an ATI 9600XT but think it on the edge.

I do not / can not run VMR for HD because VMR can not use video card hardware acceleration. Without DXVA hardware acceleration, CPU is very much consumed for HD decoding.

HD material will bring throughputs up about 7 to 10 times that of Hauppauge SDTV across the board. HDD and subsystem will have to do something like 15 to 20 times higher data rate for Live viewing. This will keep HDD(s) and subsystem pretty busy.

In general, I would definitly not recommend using AV software for HTPC. Seems many in the AVSForum agree that AV can be trouble for HTPC. AV software always wants to have a sniff at everything that goes by; there is no time for any of that business.

DFA

[chrise2]

Switching from VMR9 to Overlay fixed my performance problems. Everything is much smoother. As far as not being able to watch live TV, I was able to fix that by recreating my graph and using the Sage Dump filter instead of the one I was using. My only problem left is I'm getting audio playback errors trying to playback some stuff. I've tried different audio decoders and all the same result.

[eobiont]

Update on freezing problem.

I am still having freezing problems, but doing a "reload media player" will unfreeze. I am starting to think it might be a problem with the mpeg decoder.

What are you guys using for the mpeg2 decoder in Sage?

I and using the intervideo NonCSS for Hauppauge.
Other options I have are Cyberlink VideoSP decoder and NVIDIA Video Decoder.

The NVIDIA one works, but also freezes occasionally. In addition the NVIDIA driver does this brightness/contrast flashy thing when playing back HDTV recordings.

Maybe I am having codec issues?

When the freezing occurs, I have opened the Task Manager and see that I am using about 8-10% of the processor and 530M of 1G available memory.