Recording HDTV questions

[lovingHDTV]

I have been getting pretty bad results on my HDTV recordings. They are recorded incorrectly. In that I mean that I get tons of pixelization, stuttering, and dropped sound. I know that my reception is fine as I watch live HDTV without issues on my STB. I watched 3 hours of Olympics last night and never saw a single pixelization. The signal strenght is exceptional.

I do believe that it is caused by my using storage that is not local to my sage server. My sage server is a 2500+ AMD with 512MB ram, and nothing except Sage running on it. It is connect to my Linux Samba array via a 1Gb network connection. I know I get plenty of throughput as I have done file copy tests.

However, my recordings are not working out well. My HD recordings on the samba server are all poor quality, buy my SD recordings to the same machine are always perfect. I record them at the "Great" setting.

I have to wonder if Sage is having a hard time streaming all the data to the Samba server, or maybe the Samba server gets a little backed-up and Sage cannot handle it.

Is anyone successfully recording HDTV to a remote drive? I have tried using a local drive and have no problems.

thanks,