Sage 4 is locking up when I sometimes select "watch now"

[cmaffia]

I've already tested myself with a fresh installation of 4.0 using the orginal STV sage comes with and I can still duplicate lockups when chosing "Watch Now"

Originally Posted by heffe2001

It's happened a couple times on my systems, but only in the last couple days. And only happened on the PC's I've upgraded to the latest dev version of SageMC... What STV you guys using?

[cmaffia]

I've found a way to avoid the "Watch Now" lockup by not using two specific codecs.
I believe the "Watch Now" lockup triggered by using these codecs is the symptom of a bigger problem.
I don't define this discovery as a workaround but rather an illustration that something is not quite right with this particular version of Sage.

When using the Intervideo for Hauppauge and Nvidia decoders, the "Watch Now" problem exists. However, when I use these decoders with 3D accelaration off, the problem goes away (and PQ is degraded!). I can enable 3D acceleration when using the built-in SageTV decoder and the regular Intervideo decoder (from a WinDVD 5 install) without experiencing the "Watch Now" lockup. Unfortunately, I am very partial to the Nvidia decoder as I believe it offers the best PQ so this bug is really affecting me.

I have provided SageTV with all of my findings in bug reports and follow-up emails. The last email from them (November 19th) said they could not duplicate this issue and they are still investigating. I have not heard from them since but I emailed them today requesting status and also sent them a link to this thread.

I am totally convinced this is a bug introduced by v4.0. I can roll back to version 2.2.8 on the same hardware and use the Hauppauge and Nvidia decoders without ANY issues (as I have been for almost 2 years)

Originally Posted by Todd33

I'm running stock Sage 4, one PVR-250. I don't think I even have the Nvidia decoder. I'll check which one later (it's locked up now). It's very intermittent.

[robertmcox]

While waiting for a fix for this one, a new issue began occuring for me:

The Sage client (running in service mode) would magically disappear! It was random and started happening overnight a lot.

So then I started investigating and found that hddhealth (cool freeware utility) was predicting smart failure of the system disk drive and the attribute change events in hddhealth's log just happened to correspond to my "watch now" bug and my "magic disappearing sage" bug. Interestingly, windoze reported absolutely nothing in the event log and chkdsk ran clean too. Now I think I oughtta file a bug report with Bill....

So I went and bought myself a new 250GB HDD for xmas (present to myself) to replace the failing 40 and did a clean reload of Sage and now the issue appears to be gone for me. And for bonus points, I almost tripled my video storage (there another 160gb in there, too).

Maybe a coincidence?

NOTE: Enable the "hidden" features and turn on the disk space bar when you add disk space so you can keep tabs on Sage's work!

[robertmcox]

Yet again, I spoke too soon!

It appears this issue is pretty random. Got the freeze again today with my brand new HDD. Guess it was a good excuse to upgrade, though...

[basset]

Hi

Seems like I'm in the same boat for the last couple of days.

System:
Windows XP Pro
SageTV 4.1.4
Java 1.5 (latest build)
SageMC (dev build)

Symptoms:
1) Tonight (first time) switching between live shows locked up (100% CPU)
2) an earlier recorded TV show locks up right at the start

I looked at the problematic mpeg file .. on another PC the file seems to have some kind of error in the mpeg incoding almost right at the start. On the other PC, it briefly shows some large block encodings at the tom and then continues happely on. Not on SageTV

SageTV behaviour:
Each decoder on sage, behaves a little bit differently when trying to view this MPEG file
1) SageTV MPEG Vide Decoder - Hangs 100% CPU
2) InterVideo Hauppauge decoder (latest) - causes the vodeo to fast forward, no controls are sluggish ... can stop the playback at least
3) Cyberlink Video/SP decoder ( from PowerDVD install) - causes a "Error in playback -4:0xXXXXXX or something similar)
4) CyberLink Video/SP decoder (ATI) - hangs

I have in the last 2 days noticed other MPEG recording having the same "errors" in the mpeg stream, most of them does not cause this "broken" behavior.

Now .. here is my assumption.

When sometimes switching between live shows, sagetv causes these "errors" in the mpeg stream when writing it to disk (since sagetv always writes it first to disk before displaying it), then when trying to decode it, the player chokes on the "broken" mpeg stream and the system hangs.

I have turned on debug and got a log where a thread is hung and showing the other errors. Maybe what I can do is see if I can "chop" the start off this mpeg file ans send it to sage for them to look at.

As I metioned .. everything seemed to work fine untill a couple of days ago. It seems the problem started with my update from the first 4 release to the latest 4.1.4. I haven't tried 4.1.3 .. but my guess is it will suffer from the same problem. I can try going back to the first 4.x release and see if that fixes the "broken recorinds" which I think is the root cause of this all.

Thanks
Basset

[robertmcox]

Interesting hypothesis, basset...

...I don't observe the "blocks" when I get this issue and after restarting the Sage Client, Watch Now works for the recording in question so I think at least in my case it's probably not the .mpg file. I have read other posts about PVR cards overheating or otherwise malfunctioning and garbling the files, though.

It seems pretty random in my case.

[basset]

Hi ...

Mhhmm I've had the cards in there for more than a year now ... didn't think about the overheating part ... I'll check on that.

It recorded another "broken" show yesterday ... after tinkering with it ... it seems that the current decoders I have can't play the file (even WMP can't play it)

The one thing that was interesting, is that for the broken and working MPEG files, graph edit shows two different graphs (just started a new thread on this) .. the probken one uses a different MPEG2 splitter than the working one ....

Both files were recorded the same day ... with same version of Sage ...

Something is amiss

Basset

[basset]

Well .. so much for my theory

I just had sage lock up when switching between two "good" recorded shows ... and selecting "play" for the second show while the first one was still playing

I think I'm actually seeing 2 problems .. the mpeg files with the erros .. and the lockup when playing ..

I can not recall seeing any of these in 4.0.1 ... so I'm going to try and switch back to that from a clean 2.2 install ... see if that goes away

Hopeful ...

Basset

[olorijn]

I'm experiencing the lockups too, but only after switching from viewing a recorded show, to say another recorded show, or watching live TV.

As long as I press 'stop', before selecting a new recorded show to watch, it works fine and doesn't freeze.

If I forget to press 'stop' between switching between recorded shows, or switching to live tv, it freezes.

[Devin]

I have the freeze problem as well. I REALLY like SageTV. I ran on an old system for a while (1.7Ghz w/ XPpro), but have just purchased a new P4 3.4Ghz Gateway 704GE, 1GB RAM, ATI x300SE video, 250GB HD, XPHome. I hoped that setting up on a clean new fast system would solve the problem. It didn't. Same problem, both systems. I've been using Sage v4 since November 2005.

The freeze ups for me ONLY happen on the WatchNow button. Everything else works great! I'm a sw developer, so I've been watching for a way to repeat this. So far, it is totally random. I tried stopping first, moving the curson around the Watch Now form, everything. It happens sometimes after watching a recorded show, sometimes when trying to watch something live, just no rhyme or reason. It usually only locks once a day. I have to ctrl-alt-del and kill the process, and simply restart Sage, and I'm good for almost 20 more hours.

I have just added the debug flag and we'll see what happens. I hope Sage will at least release a version that puts some special logging behind the Watch Now button.

I have noticed that even when it locks the UI, it still is recording in the background if it was when it locked.

[DRM2PVR]

I just picked this bug a few days ago. Random freezes of the UI when selecting "Watch Now". Any new news on this, is there a new release of Sage yet?

[SteveP]

This is a very interesting thread and seems to have identified all of the lock up and corrupted file problems I've been having. My other threads have related to various parts of what has been described here. I have a fresh system with the latest Sage 4 beta, two Vbox digital tuners, and all new hardware. As others have mentioned, Sage 2 worked fine (on my old decommissioned system). I have tried Sonic and PureVideo decoders with equal results. I also have uninstalled Sage and Java several times with various combinations of Sage 4.1.x and JRE xxx. I have had random problems with:

- Very chopped up video when selecting "watch now" while another show is being recorded. Stop the video and Sage stops responding. This seems to crash the system almost all of the time.
- Corrupted mpeg files. Happens occasionally.
- Show has been partially recorded and start to watch the show from the beginning causes Sage lockup part of the time.
- Sage sometimes stops responding to remote commands when part way into watching a prerecorded show. Mouse then works for one or two clicks then whole computer stops responding. Have to restart the computer two times to cancel this problem.
- WAF = 0 (now a full-time problem)

Steve

[robertmcox]

If you are using the nvidia decoders, you might try:

use deccheck (ms util) to give preference to nvidia decoders
use win media player to play a video
while video is playing, right-click tray icon for nvidia decoder
automatic (some recommend smart)
pixel-adaptive
vmr9
in audio/video set vmr9, default, default, default, default, default, ....

after doing this, i observe that sage is no longer has the watch now bug and also when playing a video in sage, the nvidia decoder properties have different options for deinterlace mode!

[pjriley]

I have been following this thread. Just adding my voice to the corus.

I have experimented for 3 months to find a way to avoid the intermittent hangs after hitting Watch Now. No success yet.

This is the single most frustrating bug I see in Sage 4.

[kaudley]

Just dumping in my 2 cents aswell... I thought that maybe it was because I didn't have a fresh install of winxp and sagetv.

Looks like I'm seeing the same issues as the others in this thread. I'll try the setup of purevideo suggested above to see if the crashing goes away. Sure would be nice to see the SageTV folks address this issue.

[robertmcox]

Well, yet again I spoke too soon -- it happened to me this AM again.

The above decoder settings did make a very significant reliability improvement, though.

[HeyGuy101]

Well I will add my 2 cents into this as well. I too have been experiencing this bug since about a week after upgrading to v4; using the same system that worked flawlessly before the upgrade. I have yet to find any pattern to it, other than pressing the "Watch Now" button and letting the chips fall. It does, on occasion, mess up the mpeg stream on the active tuner; but will always require a process kill and SageTV restart.
It seems like no one has posted anything about this in about a month, did it all just go away for you or is there a work-around that I didn't find?

[SteveP]

About a week and a half ago I had another crash episode from hell. Sage would not operate properly even after three computer reboots. I was trying to watch a previously recorded show while Sage was recording two other shows.

I upgraded to v4.1.10 and reinstalled Girder from scratch (the remote would quit working after about 3 or 4 clicks). So far the system has worked ok, BUT this may not be an indication that all is well since Sage has worked for a week to a week and a half before and then crashed. The problems seem to occur when I turn off the computer and restart it later. During this latest period I have let Sage run for several days and have tried turning off the computer each evening and restarting it the next day.

Steve

[12three45]

Just wanted to add that I too have the same problem. Brand new to Sage TV and it is not impressing me too much. Switched from Windows MCE becuase Sage could support more than 2 analog tuners. However, MCE setup was so much easier and intuitive, Sage is far more complicated. Settings for decoders, lockups, settings for video quality, tearing, remote setup, etc. Though I think I will stick with Sage until Vista MCE comes out. But this is a serious problem that Sage should fix.

Andy