Stability

[elaw]

Does Sage contain special code that causes it to crash when you attempt to watch a football game?

Although I rarely watch live TV on the machine in question, Sage (6.0.19) has been fairly stable lately. It records & plays back shows fine, can watch imported videos in almost all formats, does a good job with MP3's, etc. etc.

So today the wife wants to watch the Pats vs. Jets game, I tell her why don't you watch in the media room on the big screen. I set it up in advance to record the show on 2 different cards: OTA on the A180, and from DirecTV on the PVR-150 cuz somtimes the OTA reception isn't so great.

5 minutes into the game, I decide to start watching. I go to the program guide and select the OTA/HD version, and tell it to play. I'm immediately rewarded with a "Sage has lost connection to the service..." message. I want a few moments for it to recombobulate itself, go back to main menu, back to program guide, this time I select the DirecTV channel and tell it to watch that. Same thing, except this time after giving the "lost connection" message the UI locks up complely - I can't even alt-F4 out of it.

Finally manage to bring task manager up and close the Sage client. I figure maybe this is a service problem, so I shut off the service and fire up the client again. Try to watch the HD version again, same thing: "lost connection" message.

So I figure maybe it's a problem with trying to record on two cards at the same time... I go in and cancel the recording on the A180. "REC" indicator is lit up so presumably it's still recording on the PVR-150. I go in to watch the show, and get the famous "problem rendering the audio portion of the content" message. Tried a few other things like going to "live TV" or "recordings" instead of thru the program guide, same problem. Switched audio decoder and renderer (which were working fine before w/recorded shows), same problem.

I finally gave up, the wife's watching the game on the Tivo which we use daily and has crashed ONCE in the three years we've owned it... when I was messing with its software!

I guess I could file a bug report and under "steps to reproduce" tell them they have to try it during a Patriots game?

</rant>