sagetv client freezes alot

[zeltak]

Hi guys

I have in addition to the main sagetv media center a sagetv client installed in my bedroom. its installed on my laptop with a tv out (celron 1 ghz, 256 mb ram, trident blade video card, 40 gb hd). i used to have meedio up until this week on it and all my media including DVD worked flawlessly. now with the sage client i get alot of freezes (every time i try to play a video or tv). i just want to be able to access my media (music, videos) from my media server computer (not the HTPC) and play them with sage ,i dont really need to stream live tv. does anyone know the causes for these freezes?

best wishes

Zeltak

[zeltak]

anyone guys?

im sorry to nag but i cant watch anything in my computer sage just gets stuck all the time, really could use any help at all

best wishes


zeltak

[Opus4]

Is DirectX and your video card drivers up to date? Have you tried changing the video renderes and/or decoder in SageTV? Did you try disabling 3D Acceleraton in SageTV?

You could contact tech support -- there is a link in my sig lines & on the main forum page. If you need to get a debug log of what is happening, info on how to do that is here.

- Andy

[zeltak]

hi opus and thx for the answer.

i will open a support request if i dont get an answer here. i have the latest directx, the 3D Acceleraton is off. the thing is it dosent get stuck while watching something, it happens alot in menus or when i use the remote to switch sagetv screens. i get the sage logo spining forever. after 5-10 minutes it unfreezes and i can use it for a bit again until the next freeze. if anyone knows about this id love to hear. btw im runing the latest client 5.02

best wishes

Zeltak

[mike1961]

Can you tell us more about your setup? Is it only freezing on the laptop? Is your laptop a wireless? Do you have power mgmt enabled on your server or laptop? What kind of setup do you have?

EDITED: Have you tried restarting your SageControl on the file server? Does it only get stuck on the client? Are you using a static or dymamic IP on the server and the client? Is the client wireless?

Mike

[zeltak]

hi and thx again for the answers!

ok my set up is this: i have a toshiba satelite laptop which is a celron 1 ghz, 256 mb ram, trident blade video card and 30gb hd. the freezings only happen on my laptop not on my servers (runs perfectly there) which is a p4 1.7 500mb ram machine. i am connected through LAN and both my server and clietns have static ips (192.158.0.XX). as for power managment i dont see a place to disable it in the detailed setup menu just to configure it.

"Have you tried restarting your SageControl on the file server?" i dont know exaclty what you mean by "sage control" but yes i have restarted both client and server multiple times.

Hope i will get this solved becuase right now i just bought the sage client and its just truthfully useless

best wishes and thx for all the help

Zeltak

[mike1961]

Regarding your Toshiba Satellite are you running Win 98 or XP? XP is going to be pushing it with 256K. In any event, start by going into Sage and trying to play music (you said it crashes sometimes) but when it's not crashing play the music and if you have XP go to the task manager and check to see how much in CPU resources Sage is using on your laptop. Let us know because that could be the only problem that needs to be corrected. Regarding power management, this is setup in the control panel but it's a non-issue if you are on your laptop...however, it "might" be an issue if the other computer is going into standby then your laptop as a client cannot access the computer in standby (which also power mgmt may be checked in the control panel).

Check that and report back and if you feel like reading a more involved info on networks read on....

Okay - first, let me say that I currently have 5 clients setup and it's working great but it does take some time and tweaking which is more a computer issue than a Sage issue. Also, I have a file server that sits passively in the closet and does nothing but run SageControl (server) and also accepts incoming faxes (but that's a separate program).

First - it sounds like you have two computers and that is it (no third computer as a server that runs SageControl and sits "passively" in the closet somewhere not running any applications. Ideally, it's going to be way more reliable to have a separate computer acting as a "file server" not running any applications. This is because if your main computer glitches out, has spyware or you run some application that causes a problem then all your other computers can get "disconnected" from the server. Is any of this making sense? I'm not saying you have to get a file server but you will have to troubleshoot to figure out if the problem is from your laptop, the main computer or a cable (you never indicated if you were wireless or not..both work on a lan).

So, regarding SageControl the situation is this, first I personally don't recommend using a computer as a workstation and a server (but if you have only a few and you are not using the main computer for much of anything else then you can get away with it). BThe problem is if you have a glitch at your main computer running Sage then it's going to glitch all the workstations as well. In other words, I have a computer that sits in the closet and does nothing but run SageControl. I'm not sure but with Sage on your main computer if you exit out of it then your laptop might not be able to connect.

Hope that helps,
Mike

Originally Posted by zeltak

ok my set up is this: i have a toshiba satelite laptop which is a celron 1 ghz, 256 mb ram, trident blade video card and 30gb hd. the freezings only happen on my laptop not on my servers (runs perfectly there) which is a p4 1.7 500mb ram machine. i am connected through LAN and both my server and clietns have static ips (192.158.0.XX). as for power managment i dont see a place to disable it in the detailed setup menu just to configure it.

"Have you tried restarting your SageControl on the file server?" i dont know exaclty what you mean by "sage control" but yes i have restarted both client and server multiple times.

Hope i will get this solved becuase right now i just bought the sage client and its just truthfully useless

best wishes and thx for all the help

Zeltak

[zeltak]

Wow mike thx for your lenghty answer, i apprciate it!

I will now tell you the exact setup as requested and the "music test" info you told me about.
First of all i am not using wifi but rather a normal LAN connection (a simple cable ). I am using XP but in all other programs it works well. I have a file server (which runs linux) for all my media files yet the sagetv media center is in the living room on a windows machine (p4 1.7ghz, 512 ram) and it draws the music, videos and pic files from the linux media server (it works flawlessly). Another thing is that the sage server (my living room HTPC) never goes into standby or sleep so we can rule that put as a cause. Before my switch this week to sagetv i used meedio for a few years (on all my pc) and it worked flawlessly with the same laptop for music, videos, pictures etc.. with the same network config as i have right now.

WOW....i am now doing the test (playing music) and i can see something is wrong with the sagetv client ...it takes 100% CPU power and 180 MB pf mem!! im sure its not that power hungry usually so im guessing now that there is a mem glitch?

anyway i hope all this info helps and may help other people with the same problem

thx alot again

Zelta

[gplasky]

A Toshiba laptop with a 1GHz celeron and a Trident video is not going to cut it as a client. You have no hardware to take any advantage for DirectX9 or 8, and 256 MB of system memory combined with a 1GHz celeron is just barely enough to run XP. A good test would be to copy over a Sage recording to the laptop and open it in Windows Media Player. Let me know how that little experiment goes. The client requires to be much more powerful than the Sage server because it has to do all the video processing. People have run the Sage server on old Pentium 2 and 3 cpus. And for recording it was fine. For actually playing the recording you need a more powerful client. My 2 cents.

Gerry

[dagar]

I have or had rather, an IBM Stinkpad T20 (or 22) P3 1.13Ghz with Trident video (Svid) running XP and was an okay Sage client ... but it had 512mb of DRAM and was [obviously] in Overlay mode.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by dagar

I have or had rather, an IBM Stinkpad T20 (or 22) P3 1.13Ghz with Trident video (Svid) running XP and was an okay Sage client ... but it had 512mb of DRAM and was [obviously] in Overlay mode.

OH-don't get me wrong. With those 2 caveats (more memory and overlay) it could be used. (In your words "was an ok Sage client"). But sometimes it's not worth the time, effort and expense to get "an old machine" usable. And by the time you do you start wondering about doing HD or "making it better" and you end up scrapping what you have anyways. I'm guess I'm saying look at the big picture. (I guess "not going to cut it as a client" was a little strong. )

Gerry

[mike1961]

Originally Posted by zeltak

WOW....i am now doing the test (playing music) and i can see something is wrong with the sagetv client ...it takes 100% CPU power and 180 MB pf mem!!Zelta

Now we are getting somewhere. Go into Setup, Detailed Setup, Video/Audio and at the top let us know what the Video Renderer is and try changing it to Overlay and also what is the Audio Renderer (change that to Default).

Try that, play some songs or TV and let us know if your resources go down. They should drop to around 10%. By the way, the fact they are using 100% resources is definitely what is causing the problem. Also, once this problem is rectified, it's a good idea to just check resources on your other computer and server as well. The server (if only running Sage Control should take almost no resources at all provided that you have tuners that do hardware encoding which most of them these days do).

EDITED: TWO THINGS: First, I think there is some kind of bug in the latest version because when I set my video renderer to the VMR9 I'm not only getting a handle leak but also 60-90% of resources are used on my machine and I have a 2.66 ghz/1gb RAM so something is just not right with that setting because I did not have this problem in prior versions but Overlay works fine for me.

Second: you said you only need to play music so you could consider setting your default quality down to maybe .7 gb/hour or something which might also take the load off but I would start with changing the renderer to overlay.

Mike

[zeltak]

Hi again all

Mike , the video renderer is overlay, and the audio renderer is default. even without playing anything sagetv is runing at 80 % cpu and 150 mb mem, with playing a song it jumps to 100 % cpu. Now after checking sagetv on my htpc (sage server) i found out it takes 200mb ram, that also seems very very strange, i dont think it should use that much.

another thing i might add if i didnt explain correctly is that i mainly want to use sage client as frontend to play music divx and mpeg already in my file server (linux) and not to stream live tv. i think that the computer can handle it (regarding prior remarks )becasue it worked perfectly with meedio, and if i open a divx, mpeg etc...in windows media player it works well so i really think its the 100 cpu and mem leak in sage thats causing it.

hope we can find a solution!

best wishes

Zeltak!