Is there a Wiz.bin cleaner out there?

[perfessor101]

Hey, hello

The SageTV interface on both my client and server systems became extemely slow over the last two weeks and thinking it was either a windows or java update tried to ignore it (I really have started to hate reinstalling windows ... about every three months on average unless I don't let my system run for more that 24 hours without a restart).
I was poking around in the SageTV directory and found my Wiz.bin was 56 MB's and it's periodic processing was slowing sage and the computer to a crawl about every 10 seconds.
I hunted through and my last backup of my Wiz.bin under 56MB's was March 5th, 2006 (I shoulda installed and started using Acronis True Image 9 about one week earlier).
When I was using SageTV 2 thru 3 I had a script that did daily backups of the compete sagetv install along with backing that up weekly (14 days of backups) and with the stability as of late I didn't think I needed to set that up in the last install as of November 2005 and am once again reminded ... always have a backup of anything important to you ;-)

So back to the question ... is there anyway to clean up a wiz.bin file (export or import the information) or do I need to restore a one month old wiz.bin or should I start a new wiz.bin from scratch?

Thanks for your time,
and listening to my frustrations,

Bobby

ps -- I've started playing with Gentoo as a samba server running raid5 ... and was curious how stable is the SageTV linux edition?

[blade]

Your Wiz.bin file contains your watched history and your favorites. If you revert back to an older version you're going to lose the info that was added. That does sound like a really big Wiz.bin, but it shouldn't be bogging down your system.

[perfessor101]

I did an uninstall of both Java the Hauppage WinTV PVR 500MCE drivers and SageTV, deleted all associated deleteable directories (SageTV and Java), rebooted.
I reinstalled the latest Hauppage WinTV PVR 500 MCE drivers (cd3.1b - 23348), then SageTV (4.1.13) and the bundled Java (jre1.5.0_06).

With a fresh wiz.bin the SageTV interface was quick and responsive, with the March 5th, 2003 wiz.bin file the interface was quick and responsive.
With the bloated wiz.bin I couldn't even move up or down more than 7 menu items in the SageRecordings list without a five or ten second hang or change menus without a 15 or twenty second hang (my last recording on Space channel was 26 GB's and you could see that it was starting to bleed the frames in the recording from previous to next, like it couldn't finish capyuring one frame before the next had started). I think the log said something about AWT hang time detected 15764 near the end in one log file.

Currently I've reverted to the old March 5th Wiz.bin (but I've only watched about 2 hours of SageTV a day since then, been playing with Gentoo on an old system setting up a samba server in raid 5) but in the past when I was having lots of trouble with the wiz.bin I usually had to revert three to four days before the wiz.bin broke or it would quickly corrupt again.

I know that the problem is probably windows as the SageTV service stopped working a while ago and I have been running it as not-service for the last 3 months, which is when I should have reinstalled windows.

I get decent hardware, but for some reason windows has never seemed to be my friend. Windows 98 I reinstalled about once every four months, Windows ME about every three, Windows 2000 about every four, Windows XP seems to be about every three again. My service provider uses F Secure which was also hanging my system up and may have been why I didn't suspect SageTV right away (ditched that). And now after many years of always leaving my computers running continuosly, now I shut the ones down that I can over night and restart the others every morning via psshutdown. The SageTV server I would only restart weekdays as my restart time fell in the middle of my TV time on the weekends.

All of which leads me to ask ... how stable is the SageTV linux system at present and can I swap over?

Just before I pull out my Windows 2005 MCE OEM cd for yet another install next weekend.

Thank you for your time,

Bobby

[blade]

Sorry you didn't mention

In one month it went from 5.5 MB to 56 MB

in your first post. Obviously you have a corrupted wiz.bin as you already know. I thought you were just wanting to trim down the size in an attempt to speed things up.

I get decent hardware, but for some reason windows has never seemed to be my friend. Windows 98 I reinstalled about once every four months, Windows ME about every three, Windows 2000 about every four, Windows XP seems to be about every three again.

Are your Sage machines dedicated boxes or are they used for other uses? If you're not installing a lot of junk software then windows shouldn't need reinstalling that often. My WindowsXP server is never shutdown except for power failures or updates which is every 3-4 months and I installed Windows around 1 year and 4 months ago.

I have no experience with the linux version of Sage.

[perfessor101]

I use the system mainly as SageTV server and for it's client interface ... my main system would slow down too much because of F-Secure (F-Prot) to be usable as a client machine.

Ideally I would like to just uncorrupt my wiz.bin file, if shrinking or cleaning it up exporting and then reimporting ... would help. SageTV may work fne with a good Wiz.bin that size, but mine currently is not usable and couldn't even hardware capture properly on Saturday. I had three recordings two 30 minute and 1 an hour long that were 25/26 Gb's and contained about six hours of video on the same (different) channels each and you could see the system was having problems bleeding the previous frame into the next on those recordings.

Windows XP MCE 2005 OEM system with the following software installed:
Acronis True Image 9.0 ... just installed two weeks ago two late
AutoIt v3
AVG Free Edition (F-Secure from Shaw Cable would bog the system down severely about every 30 seconds ... [work - around disable windows file protection and system restore, not])
DivX 6.0
Dragon Global (1st Dirmon, then Dirmon2 and Show Analyzer from 5.4 - 6.2 currently)
DS Clock for checking the timeserver every hour (1.7)
GyroTools PC Edition 7.1
IrfanView 3.97
Mozilla 1.7.8
Nero 7 Ultra 7.0.5.4
Powertoys for Windows XP (Tweakui for auto logon and disabling autoplay)
r2 Studios Startup Delayer (runs each startup program with a delay)
SageTV 4.1.13
SpyBot Search and Destroy 1.4
UltraVNC 1.0.1
Windows Resource Kit Tools for windows 2003 and XP
WinRar 3.50
XviD-1.0.3-20122004 _Final Release_
ZoneLabs Zonealarm 6.1.744.001
Adobe Reader 7.07
Windows Defender
and all past and current updates from the Microsoft Update Website

the hardware is :
Abit AN7 Nforce 250 motherboard with a AMD 2600 XP+ processor and 1 GB DDR 400 ram
ATI AIW 9600 XT with Catalyst from September 14, 2005 5.10
2 x Hauppage WinTV PVR 500 MCE cards (Driver 23348)
USB UIRT with 45 button hauppage remote
Gyration Keyboard and mouse
Liteon 1633s DVDRW
1 x 300 GB Seagate SATA drive
2 x 250 GB Seagate PATA drives

I know it's all my own fault ... it cost me 30 days of show data ... but now I've backup

Bobby

[dvd_maniac]

If you go through your viewing history and clear old stuffs Watched status, I think it keeps the Wiz.bin filesize down.

[Opus4]

I don't now why wiz.bin would jump such a large amount in such a short time, though, unless you suddenly got a HUGE number of channels in your lineup or newly imported files. I would contact tech support to see what they suggest.

If you've got a wiz.bin file & some configuration that can reproduce any corruption, then SageTV needs to know so they can look into what is causing it.

- Andy

[Narflex]

I'd really like to see that bloated Wiz file. Can you send it to betatest at sagetv.com please?

[perfessor101]

I'm thinking it may be more Windows XP MCE 2005 than Sage, the hardware is pretty good ... I've checked the drives with SpinRite ...

There were'nt any major lineup changes that I could find over the last two months(one channel added), currently the wiz.bin from 6 weeks ago is staying around 5.7 MB's so whatever the corruption was it hasn't reproduced itself on my system again.

I did see that my list of favorites is growing quite large ... instead of trying to do manual conflict resolution under 3.0 I started adding movies and one off shows as Favorites to let Sage handle conflict resolution. It was too confusing then trying to guess when the manual records weren't going to conflict with something out of the three day window for scheduling.

I got an email back from support so after I transfer it from the server to my main system and then find an ftp client I'll upload it to the ftp server.


Bobby

[aperry]

Originally Posted by perfessor101

I got an email back from support so after I transfer it from the server to my main system and then find an ftp client I'll upload it to the ftp server.

No need. You can FTP from the command line:

1. Open a command prompt
2. CD to where your file is you want to transfer
3. Enter "ftp servername" (leave off the quotes, "servername" is the name of the ftp server that support sent you)
4. Enter any login information to connect to the FTP site
5. Enter "bin" (puts you in binary mode)
6. Enter "hash" (prints back "#" characters as the transfer is going)
7. If they told you to put the file in a particular directory, enter "cd directory"
8. Enter "put filename" ("filename" is the file you want to send)
9. When the transfer finishes, enter "quit"

[perfessor101]

Wiz.bin's and *.logs are being uploaded as I type to a directory called perfessor101


Bobby

Edit : Thanks for the information ... I downloaded a FTP Server first (it's been too long since I used FTP) and then downloaded a freeware FTP Client and batched all the wiz.bin's and backup Wiz.bin's along with Sage*.logs and SageClient*.logs for transfer