Channel changing issue (R5000 network encoder)

[Kirby]

How many channel changes did you do? how quickly? Stress that sucker out will ya? Do 30-40 channel changes relatively quickly. say 5-10 seconds on each channel. Mix in some SD and HD channels if you can.

I do not run service mode, I will try it this weekend, after I get my new sage server built and configured.

[camTexas]

I only had time for maybe 8-10 channel changes last night and only a couple this morning. All were pretty quick both with the channel up/down as well as through the guide all changing pretty much as soon as the video started playing. I'll stress test some more tonight and post my results.

[NEOSG]

camTexas,

by pretty quick, do you mean 8-10 seconds? My channel change time when running Sage as a service and accessing R5000 channels via a sage client over a gigabit network, is about 8-10 seconds per channel change. This is with a Dish 6000. I have a Dish 211 coming, so I am curious to see any differences in performance with the newer box

[Kirby]

I think he means that after the channel tuned in, he watched for a few seconds, then changed again. You wont get around the 8-10 seconds "tuning" time on the R5000. And on a 211/411 box, it is also 8-10 seconds to tune in a channel. You have about 2-3 seconds for the 3-4 digit channel entry to the receiver, then another 1-2 seconds for the receiver to acquire and lock in the channel, and then the R5000 dvr app has to start remuxing the stream. The only place to shave time off would be in the digit entry mode really, and you could quite easily lose reliability by going faster.

[camTexas]

OK. Yes I did mean I changed the channels after the playback of the video started on the screen. I just completed 20 changes. Two reboots. Then 30 more changes all working perfectly. Don't know why but it's nice to for once have the service work. For many of my pre-R5000 setups whatever I used for tuning internal cards, IR blasters, Serial connection to STB... all bombed when in service mode.

Now I'm just down to not viewing my locals and a few other H.264 channels (Dish Vip211 R5000 setup). Anyone have that working?

Another "minor" annoyance is I can only view my R5000 captures in SOURCE mode. I'd like to stretch out some of my SD viewing to fill my screen. I setup my R5000 at the same time I upgraded from 4.x to 5.x so I'm not sure which change is driving this problem.

[Kirby]

Not sure why service mode fixed it for you. Can you post your setup, along with video/audio codecs?

[camTexas]

Server: AMD 64 2800+, EVGA 7600GS, Sage v5.0.2.90, Currently running trial version of Cyberlink v7 decoder (trying to get H.264 Purevideo working). R5000 on Vip211 running single Sage instance HD-DVR setup as the network encoder.

What else do you want to know?

I do have a 2nd R5000 I just haven't installed as I was trying to troubleshoot all my current issues, so I haven't tried the Nextcom dual+ Sage instance HD-DVR software.

[Kirby]

For those of you wanting to try this, I think we have gotten a fix for channel changing issues on the R5000.

Set these lines as following your sage.properties file and try changing channels:

seeker/fast_mux_switch=false

videoframe/fast_file_switching=false

That will blow away the current recording and playback graphs, and re-create them on the channel change. This should also fix issues changing from a High Def AC3 channel to a Standard Def mpeg-audio channel, and vice versa.

Post your results please!

[NEOSG]

Originally Posted by camTexas

Server: AMD 64 2800+, EVGA 7600GS, Sage v5.0.2.90, Currently running trial version of Cyberlink v7 decoder (trying to get H.264 Purevideo working). R5000 on Vip211 running single Sage instance HD-DVR setup as the network encoder.

What else do you want to know?

I do have a 2nd R5000 I just haven't installed as I was trying to troubleshoot all my current issues, so I haven't tried the Nextcom dual+ Sage instance HD-DVR software.

Dual works dine for me. Only issue I have is when starting the sage server, the R5000hd.exe shortcuts x2 that are in the stratup folder error out when the box first launches. I got around this by using a batch file to launch 1 instance, sleep for 30 seconds, and launch the 2nd instance of the R5000HD.exe apps.

[DualQuad]

Originally Posted by Kirby

For those of you wanting to try this, I think we have gotten a fix for channel changing issues on the R5000.

Set these lines as following your sage.properties file and try changing channels:

seeker/fast_mux_switch=false

videoframe/fast_file_switching=false

That will blow away the current recording and playback graphs, and re-create them on the channel change. This should also fix issues changing from a High Def AC3 channel to a Standard Def mpeg-audio channel, and vice versa.

Post your results please!

Kirby,
I made the changes you have indicated and the problems have greatly diminished. I have had some continued black screens (a handful really), but can't reliably reproduce the circumstances which cause this. I will keep monkeying around and will report back if I get a reliably failure scenario.
Thanks for the info.

[Kirby]

These are the settings that I am using:

seeker/fast_mux_switch=true
videoframe/fast_file_switching=false
videoframe/network_encoding_to_playback_delay=1500

Nextcom felt it was better to be false on both the recording and playback graphs, however I still had issues that way. I am now on day number 7 using these settings, and have had only 1 failed channel change, and that was due to me tuning to ESPN2 HD and the baseball game on there was blacked out. Because of that, there is no signal, and you get that popup on the receiver forcing you to either: channel up, down or go to guide, thus no way for sage to correct itself.

You might give the first line above a try, which will not reset the recording graph, only the playback graph will get re-created.

[NEOSG]

Originally Posted by Kirby

These are the settings that I am using:

seeker/fast_mux_switch=true
videoframe/fast_file_switching=false
videoframe/network_encoding_to_playback_delay=1500

Nextcom felt it was better to be false on both the recording and playback graphs, however I still had issues that way. I am now on day number 7 using these settings, and have had only 1 failed channel change, and that was due to me tuning to ESPN2 HD and the baseball game on there was blacked out. Because of that, there is no signal, and you get that popup on the receiver forcing you to either: channel up, down or go to guide, thus no way for sage to correct itself.

You might give the first line above a try, which will not reset the recording graph, only the playback graph will get re-created.

Kriby,

Are you running a sage server and a sage client on seperate boxes?


Scott

[Kirby]

Yep. I wasnt originally, but now I have a sage server running in service mode, and separate client.

Note: Updated my sig to show corrected system specs.

[NEOSG]

Originally Posted by Kirby

Yep. I wasnt originally, but now I have a sage server running in service mode, and separate client.

Note: Updated my sig to show corrected system specs.

Non-bump :-)

I pm'd you since my next question was off-topic