Very strange ff behavior with long recording

[popechild]

I'm currently recording the British Open in HD (5:30 hr long program). I started watching when the recording was already a couple of hours into it, and have just been watching from the beginning and skipping forward with the ff buttons during commercials and players I don't care about.

I've run into a very strange issue that I can't quite figure out. When I got about 2:30 hrs into the playback (still about an hour short of "live"), the ff behavior started to screw up. Or, more accurately, every other press of the ff button would screw up.

Normal behavior:
ff: +10 sec
ff: +10 sec
ff: +10 sec
etc.

Current behavior:
ff: +10 sec
ff: jumps to random place prior to current watch position
ff: +10 sec (from "correct" position: I *think*; it could be actually jumping +20 from the previous position; see timeline notes below)
ff: jumps back to same random place prior to current watch position
etc.

It's really hard to tell how far "back" it's jumping every other time, because of the nature of golf programming and how it constantly jumps around, plus the timeline shows a 10 sec jump with every single press like it should, but it seems to be at least 5-10 minutes prior to "current" time. Here's how it played out for me with specific examples (timeline times are made up to illustrate how it looks):

live time: 3:30 on timeline
current watch time: 2:30 on timeline
- watching Tiger on 12th hole
- Sergio garcia finished the 18th hole about 5 minutes ago, at 2:25
press ff: timeline jumps from 2:30:00 to 2:30:10
- watching Tiger farther ahead on 12th hole (good)
press ff: timeline jumps from 2:30:10 to 2:30:20
- watching Sergio on 18th hole (which he finished 5-10 minutes ago)
press ff: timeline jumps from 2:30:20 to 2:30:30
- watching Tiger again on 12th (I'm not sure if this is 10 or 20 sec past where it was the last time it showed him)
press ff: timeline jumps from 2:30:30 to 2:30:40
- watching Sergio on 18th hole again (at exact point it was on the last time it showed him - not 10 sec ahead)
press ff: back to tiger
etc.

It's like there are two parallel alternate realities going on here and every time I hit ff it jumps between them, but it makes it really confusing when hitting ff to figure out if it's jumping to something I've already seen or to where I should be.

I finally "caught up" with live tv, so hitting ff doesn't do anything at that point, but if I back up a few clicks, it goes right back to the same behavior on ff again. Oh, and even from "live time", the rewind button shows the same weird behavior: every other press will alternately jumps back 10 sec as it should, or jump to the weird alternate reality.

Anyone ever seen anything like this before? I'm tempted to think it has something to do with the recording being so huge, but then again, the recording had been interupted part way through, so there was probably only about an hour and a half in the single mpg file while this was going on.

Could it be related to a need to defrag? I've only had this machine up and going for about a month. Is it even a good idea to defrag (if I've formatted my drive in 64k clusters)? I heard someone say they defragged and it gave them all sorts of weird behavior in their previously recorded shows...

Thanks for any ideas!

UPDATE: Okay, it looks like somehow the "alternate reality" is the one that it gets put on when I ff as far as I can (to "live" position). Meaning, if I ff to the end of the timeline where it should be live and I can't ff anymore, it's showing Tiger on the 8th hole. If I hit rewind once to "back up" 10 sec, it jumps to Tiger on the 12th hole. Hitting ff to go back to "live" takes me back to Tiger on the 8th. (btw, the "jump" forward and back also alternates between reality and alternate reality, just in 2 minute jumps instead of 10 sec of course.)

WTH???

[GKusnick]

A number of us have seen this kind of behavior from time to time. My theory is that it has something to do with file sizes greater than 4.2 GB. See this thread:

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18042

[popechild]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

A number of us have seen this kind of behavior from time to time. My theory is that it has something to do with file sizes greater than 4.2 GB. See this thread:

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18042

Sorry, but I read that entire thread and didn't see anyone describe the same problem I'm having at all. Alot of it seemed related to Hauppauge issues as well, which I don't use.

Also, since everything I record is HD, I don't know if I ever have a file that's NOT greater than 4.2gb.

Any other ideas?