Utility: ShowAnalyzer Beta - Page 53

Humanzee · #**1041** 06-27-2007, 04:30 PM

I have diskeeper scheduled to defrag my recording directories every morning. I noticed if SA is working on a file that is being moved around the disk in the midst of a defrag session it will fail. I just set up Dirmon2 to not launch anything during the scheduled defrag sessions and I see far less if any "showanalyzer encountered an error & must close" messages. I had thought I just had a bad encoder.

I'm not complaining about this sort of failure, I had just forgot about that scheduled defrag and thought it might be something to consider for people having mysterious crashes.

geogecko · #**1042** 06-27-2007, 07:16 PM

OT

I didn't realize anyone defragged their video drives...is there some advantage to doing this, over the amount of drive wear it would create? Just wondering.

Stuntman · #**1043** 06-28-2007, 08:03 AM

Has anybody in Southern California.. specifically Time Warner cable (analog) come up with any fine tuned settings for SA? I generally run stock settings, but it usually misses at least one segment per recording.. which is fine.. just wondering if there was something I could tweak to either eliminate that missed segment or shorten the length of the errors.

Thanks!

Humanzee · #**1044** 06-28-2007, 10:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by geogecko

OT

I didn't realize anyone defragged their video drives...is there some advantage to doing this, over the amount of drive wear it would create? Just wondering.

I was getting horribly broken up video playback for a while and among other things defragmenting the recording drives seemed to help. I figured if I defrag daily the total amount of disk access done each day wouldn't be that great as the drive would be mostly defragmented already. I have 7 drives spinning now for going on 4 years 24/7. No problems yet, knock on wood.

dooferlad · #**1045** 08-06-2007, 06:14 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Humanzee

I was getting horribly broken up video playback for a while and among other things defragmenting the recording drives seemed to help. I figured if I defrag daily the total amount of disk access done each day wouldn't be that great as the drive would be mostly defragmented already. I have 7 drives spinning now for going on 4 years 24/7. No problems yet, knock on wood.

I used to defrag daily for the same reason. Now I have a dedicated partition in my PVR for video which has 64k clusters (or whatever the NTFS maximum is) and playback is fine. Microsoft get around this problem because their file format (DVR-MS) uses 100Mb blocks (I think). This reduces fragmentation down to nearly zero.

If you want to just defragment a file you can just make a copy of it (at least, this trick works in Windows) - since the OS knows how big the file is it can try and allocate continuous disk space. In theory you could write a plug in for Sage to do this automatically, say once a day it would copy all the new programs, one at a time, deleting the original once the copy was complete. It could be scheduled for the middle of the night. Of course if your disk is horribly fragmented to start with this won't help, but if you start with a clean disk and don't fill it (say, leave 10Gb free) this may work well.

dooferlad · #**1046** 08-06-2007, 06:44 AM

Hi, I have been chatting about advert detection to some friends and a couple of ideas came up:

It may be that we can use each others cpu cycles to improve advert detection: Assuming 2 people record the same program in the same area (same adverts at the same time) and clocks are well synchronised (which can be done with NTP) then if both of them perform advert detection on the stream with slightly different parameters, the combination of the two results is probably better than either individually. If 10 people record the same program (same area etc) then you could start using a voting system to increase detection quality. In the case of digital broadcasts it should be easy to use information from the transport stream to synchronise the start of the stream, so it wouldn't matter if two people had different padding settings.

Another interesting thing to look at is what bits of a program do people actually watch. I personally don't have SA integrated with Sage (it actually crashes on me at the moment, I assume because it can't cope with errors in the mpegs) so I have to skip past the adverts using the jump forward / back buttons, but these work quite well. I dare say if you looked at where I started jumping forward it would be about a second after an advert break started and where I start watching a program again it is within a few seconds of the advert break finishing. This information could be used as hints to SA as to where to look for adverts. Again, if you combine the information from multiple users you can improve your detection.

Basically this is using human computation to solve a problem that is designed to be difficult for computers to solve and easy for humans.

MattJackson86 · #**1047** 09-23-2007, 09:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jere_Jones

It shouldn't be that hard. I already collect and index the information. It would just be a matter of an STV/import writer and I coming up with a format. If there are any volunteers, just PM me.

Jere

Any word on if this feature will take place?

Stuntman · #**1048** 09-24-2007, 09:18 AM

Anybody have a good copy of 9.1 that they can either zip and send me, or make available for me to download real quickly? The copy on DragonGlobal keeps coming up as corrupted when I download it.

Thanks!!

FidgetyRat · #**1049** 09-24-2007, 03:56 PM

I finally got around to upgrading my 1.5 year old SA today. I completely forgot about new versions since it was working so well for so long.

anyway, What does linking up with the webserver actually do!? I cannot seem to find any SA documentation talking about the newer features besides half-a-sentence stating the additions.

chrisc16 · #**1050** 09-24-2007, 06:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by FidgetyRat

I finally got around to upgrading my 1.5 year old SA today. I completely forgot about new versions since it was working so well for so long.

anyway, What does linking up with the webserver actually do!? I cannot seem to find any SA documentation talking about the newer features besides half-a-sentence stating the additions.

The idea is that SA can connect to the webserver plugin and retrieve info about a recording (like channel name and number). That way you can restrict which channels SA runs on.

I can't find any documentation either, which is why I can't seem to make it work on my end.

-Chris

MattJackson86 · #**1051** 09-26-2007, 06:22 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by FidgetyRat

I finally got around to upgrading my 1.5 year old SA today. I completely forgot about new versions since it was working so well for so long.

anyway, What does linking up with the webserver actually do!? I cannot seem to find any SA documentation talking about the newer features besides half-a-sentence stating the additions.

Hows the upgrade worked out? I upgraded a week or so ago to try and fix a memory leak, but now it crashes very often...

chrisc16 · #**1052** 09-26-2007, 06:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MattJackson86

Hows the upgrade worked out? I upgraded a week or so ago to try and fix a memory leak, but now it crashes very often...

I would stay away from the latest release (0.9.1) as it is known to crash constantly. The previous one (0.9.0) is working pretty well for me, even on HD files.

-Chris

geogecko · #**1053** 09-27-2007, 05:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by FidgetyRat

anyway, What does linking up with the webserver actually do!? I cannot seem to find any SA documentation talking about the newer features besides half-a-sentence stating the additions.

Hey, FR. IIRC, linking up with the webserver provides a few features, such as being able to have profiles for certain channels, or being able to turn off commercial processing on channels (such as HBO), that do not have commercials. I think that's about all it's useful for.

FidgetyRat · #**1054** 09-27-2007, 06:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MattJackson86

Hows the upgrade worked out? I upgraded a week or so ago to try and fix a memory leak, but now it crashes very often...

Hmm to be honest, I think it is working fine. I haven't watched much tv since the upgrade a few days ago so I will get back to you.

I do know for a fact that schoolhouse crashes within 20 seconds of use. But from what I can tell all of my shows have .edl files for them since the upgrade.

I'll have to watch for any stuck processes when I get home.

davidk21770 · #**1055** 09-30-2007, 03:03 AM

I'd really like to see the file extension listed with the program in the configuration menu; ie., VideoReDo (.vprj). This would make it MUCH easier for me to make sure that I have the right files output. (I still don't know who uses the .edl files that sage now uses!).

Thanks.

Humanzee · #**1056** 10-16-2007, 12:13 AM

So im running Dirmon2 6.3 and SA 9.0 on a Vista client machine. I was running this same combo on the server but I thought id give it a break and run it on the client which has more cpu in it.

Anyway I have Dirmon2 setup to scan folders on the server via UNC paths. To do this, you have to give the Dirmon2 Service an account to run under via the services MMC. So after learning all about setting up dirmon2 to run under a user account I finally got it to launch SA to process my files across the network. However, now SA will not run in the system tray or show the status screen. It is running but hidden in the process list. I checked and rechecked the config to make sure that the status window should be shown and that the system tray should be shown and they are both set to yes, but no dice.

This wouldn't be a problem if it werent for the fact that SA occationally hangs on my HD recordings. Sometimes I have to kill the process but without the GUI its not possible to check and see if frames are actually being processed or see how long it has been running.

I'd like to get that control back, anybody have any ideas?

geogecko · #**1057** 10-16-2007, 05:53 AM

Is Invisible Mode set to "No?" This is the global setting that overides all other settings within the "Interface" group.

nyplayer · #**1058** 10-16-2007, 06:26 AM

Humanzee

I believe that what you are describing has nothing to do with ShowAnalyzer. You need to look at Dirmon2 that makes jobs invisible by default.

geogecko · #**1059** 10-16-2007, 07:08 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by nyplayer

Humanzee

I believe that what you are describing has nothing to do with ShowAnalyzer. You need to look at Dirmon2 that makes jobs invisible by default.

nyp,

I don't think it has anything to do with DM2. Once the job is started, DM2 is out of the picture. It's up to SA to decide if it will run silently or not. If you look at settings for DM2, there doesn't appear to be anything in there that would indicate it makes a particular "job" run invisible or not.

He probably has invisible mode set to "yes" in the interface settings. That would be my guess...

nyplayer · #**1060** 10-16-2007, 07:20 AM

geogecko,

I run it the same way. If i run SowwAnalyzer outside of Dirmon2 I see the window and progress display. Dirmon2 does in fact hide the jobs it runs. It is the way its supposed to work you don't want a window popping up when Dirmon2 starts comskip or show analyzer or any other job for that matter. Dirmon2 has a check mark to hide console window when you set up a job to run. Uncheck this and you should see your job running.

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