Slow Channel Changing

[Mr_X]

I am trying out SageTV with a PVR-250. I find the channel changing very slow. Is there a way to speed that up? My computer is a dual PIII/800 on WinXP, 512meg RAM and 120gigs of HD, so I don't think that's the problem (I hope!)

-Mr.X

P.S. I just realized that all the menus are slow. Makes no difference whether I'm using keyboard, mouse or remote, but it does make a difference whether the window and buttons are large or small. Some issue with the way the graphics are drawn?

[dkardatzke]

I believe we enhanced some of this with beta version 1.4. Try downloading the latest beta at http://www.sage.tv/beta.html to see if that helps.

[Mr_X]

Thank you for your reply.

I downloaded and tried the Beta. While it does seem to be a little faster, I noticed right away that my CPU usage went from about 5% (with the registry tweak suggested on the forum) to 30-40%. I tried to go back to 1.3 to compare, but I stupidly just tried to install 1.3 without uninstalling the BETA. (The BETA installed over 1.3 just fine, so who knew?? =)
Anyway, I got a java error just after the ObjectDB had finished loading on the startup screen:
java.lang.NullPointerException
... so I uninstalled both, rebooted and reinstalled 1.4. Still getting the java error. I checked the log files, but there's no entry for any of the times I tried to run it and it didn't get past the startup screen.

Any suggestions on how to fix the java error? I'd prefer to keep my channel setup as I'm using xmltv and I have to remap all the channels and the BETA doesn't allow that. (But if the Beta is run AFTER the channels are remapped in 1.3, the channel setup is kept)

-Mr.X

[mattdisaster]

I have the same problem! I ran sagetv a few times and it worked fine, but now i keep getting that same error. I've installed/uninstalled both java and sagetv more times than i can guess. Any takers as to what might be the deal? I'm running Wintv PVR-350 with all the new drivers and such. Hmmmmmm.

-matt

[gplasky]

I think you need to make sure to get rid of your sage.properties file. I think there is a difference between the two. (Or rename your original so you can get any modifications you may have made.)

Gerry

[justme]

Didn't Jeff post somewhere that the Wiz files for 1.4.X were not backward compatibable. I believe he made some changes to help with wiz corruption.

Anyway I'd try uninstalling the beta and renaming your wiz.bak, wiz.bin, and sage.properties files. Then try reinstalling SageTV. If it works at least you've narrowed it down. Then you could try substituting in your old files to see if/which one breaks Sage.

General advice to anyone who reads this. Backup your Wiz.* and sage.properties files to another location before trying a new beta. Also always uninstall the current SageTV before installing the new version(beta or official release). If things go wrong I find it much easier to fix things if I've done as suggested above. Just my 2 cents.

[mattdisaster]

Well you guys were right, fixed it right up! I have one questio though, channel changing is really slow with 350. I was on the shspvr forum and they explained its the fact that the live preview is always turned on, someone there very nicely came up with a reg edit to turn it off so you can watch tv in real time. The problem still remains for some reason though. In wintv2000, the software for the card, it changes channel in realtime. But in sagetv I find it still changing slow and when I do channel details it shows that its recording whatever channel i'm watching. Any ideas on how to stop it from recording? I'm thinking maybe that will make it realtime channel changing. Thanks alot for everything!

-matt

For more info heres the link to the topic on shspv:

http://www.shspvr.com/forum/viewtopi...&highlight=reg

[dkardatzke]

Matt,

SageTV is an always recording PVR application thus making it possible to pause live TV, rewind and fast forward at any time. We make it so the user doesn't have to decipher between Live and Recorded TV just like a TiVo. For this reason there is no option to just "pass-through" the live signal without recording it to disk first.

If you are using an external cable box and experiencing slow channel changes you can try different settings in Setup > Detailed Setup > IR Hardware and modify the Button Delay and Sequence Delay. The only problem arises when you try to make the channel change so quick that your cable box won't be able to recognize the unique codes. This is an inherent problem with any PVR utilizing an external box and an IR transmitter.

[dkardatzke]

Matt,

Forgot to ask...are you experiencing channel changing delays using a straight coax connection to the PVR-350?

[rhari]

Using SageTV 1.4.7
PIII-550mhz, 512mb, 60gb hd. Windows XP pro with all patches.

This morning I was watching CNN thru Sage. After having watched it for about 20 minutes I tried switching to a different channel using the channel up key on the remote. At that point I saw the disk spinning like crazy and after about 30-40 seconds it changed the channel. After this I was able to quickly switch to different channels.

I then tried the same experiment a little while later and yes the same behaviour i.e. if I let a program run for a while and then switch -- disk thrashes else the channel change is quick.