Severe stuttering (audio and video), what is this?

[haus]

Hi,

I've been searching for a solution to this problem but I'm not quite sure how to describe what is happening, so searching is difficult. When I record shows with my Sage system, every once in awhile the audio and video will get completely garbled. I see what looks like rainbow colors on the bottom third of the screen, and the top 2/3 are all thick blocky lines that seem to repeat. The audio will stutter horribly, so the sentence "This is a test" would sound like "th th th th th thth th th th th th thth t i i i i i i i i i i i sa sa sa sa sa tes tes tes tes tes tes tes tes tt t t t t t t t t t t t" (all those sound snippets come out super fast). I can't get a screenshot right now but I was able to get a little thumbnail of what the full screen looks like from XP's explorer window on another machine. The attached image shows two shows, one that recorded properly and the other with this weird problem. Once it occurs, I have to restart; I can't seem to recover from this.

I'm running sage 6.0.19 on a Dell Dimension Pentium 4 with 512MB RAM. I'm using the overlay renderer with the Hauppauge WinTV PVR USB2 and intervideo CSS decoder. This problem has plagued me for months. I'm using the Sage TV service under XP Pro. I have my video recording directory on a secondary hard drive in the system (80GB) that has been formatted with 64K block size as the manual suggested. My video recording quality was set to "good" and "great" and the problem has happenend under both. CPU usage seems stable around 15% when recording.

I'm hopeful that someone may be able to recognize this and even provide me with search terms on where to start. Thank you!

[geogecko]

Man...hard to say what that one is. What video card are you using. My first inclination would be to say part of the problem could be because it's a *cough* Dell.

Since it's audio and video related, it's probably not a video card issue. If you rewind the video, does the problem occur in the same location every time? Might be that you have some conflict with the USB ports that your tuner is on.

Check out Device Manager, and switch to View..Devices by connection, and look at IRQs, and see what, if anything, is being shared by the USB controllers. If it's being shared with the video card, or onboard video, then that could very well be your problem. If there are more than one USB controllers, you might want to try plugging your capture card into another USB port, and hope you can switch them.

[haus]

Jason,

Thank you very much for your thoughts. Yes, "it's a Dell.." I'm using onboard video. But it it is an audio issue as well. The Hauppauge USB tuner is the *only* USB device plugged into the entire system.

This happens randomly, and it's not a playback issue only - it happens in the recording itself (I can play the bad recording on other machines and it's still horrible).

I've tried a new experiment - recording the Battlestar Galactica Season 3 marathon today running the Sage program instead of running the service. Since I made that change everything has been flawless (going on about 5 hours now). I will continue to test this mode for awhile, but assuming it works, I wonder what can be done to make the service mode more stable? I would greatly prefer to use the service - although this machine is primarily a TV system, I would like to be able to close the Sage TV program (and reboot at times) and not have to worry about logging in when I reboot in order to have my recordings continue to work.

[haus]

So running without the service made no difference in the end - after a few hours of recording I got the same garbled results. I installed a PCI video card and disabled the onboard video and the same thing happened again (I did check, it ran on another IRQ).

While Sage was experiencing video/audio problems I installed and ran Hauppauge's WinTV program, and it worked fine. So I think this is some issue between my computer and SageTV. I'm disappointed; I like the functionality of Sage a lot but I just don't have the free time to troubleshooting this kind of thing.

[geogecko]

How long did you run the WinTV program? I'd be interested if it would occur there or not. If it does, it almost points to a hardware problem with the tuner.

[Opus4]

Also, was the Hauppauge app recording, or playing live? Make sure it is set to record.

Check the hard drive data throughput -- some people have reported that their drive got reset back to some slower speed by Windows for some reason.

In SageTV, is there another video recording dir configured for a drive that isn't using 64K clusters? If so, a recording there cold be affected by stuttering.

- Andy

[haus]

Thank you for all the replies. I did not have WinTV recording. I never even bothered installing it since it's so horrid compared to Sage. That's a very good point that I overlooked.

Drive speed is set to "performance" in the BIOS, and there are no other recording directories set up. I'm going to try to narrow this down to it being an issue with my particular Sage installation vs. a hardware issue by running another program for a few weeks. If that one has problems too, then I'll know it's not unique to my Sage setup. The problem is that I can't reproduce it quickly and reliably, so troubleshooting is very difficult. I was hoping someone would say "oh, I've seen that..." and I'd have something concrete to try.

[haus]

So I've narrowed it down to a driver or hardware issue. Problem exists with another PVR program. I'll be trying new drivers again and some new hardware is on the way, just for kicks. I've seen this problem reported in other forums as "purple and green rectangles" and such, but no one has identified the real issue or a solution yet.

[haus]

So I've narrowed it down to a driver or hardware issue. Problem exists with another PVR program. I'll be trying new drivers again and some new hardware is on the way, just for kicks. I've seen this problem reported in other forums as "purple and green rectangles" and such, but no one has identified the real issue or a solution yet. If I find anything I will post it here.

[Lucas]

Haus, is there plenty of space on your recording drive or is it almost full?

What down the fragmentation analysis say?

I had a similar problem a few months back where my 300Gb recording drive was almost full after a year of use. It was very fragmented and available space was in bits and pieces all over the drive. The result was that when recording, every now and then I would get all these hiccups in the audio and video because the drive heads could move fast enough to record the video smootly.

Also, check your IRQs and disable any mobo components that are not in use.

[geogecko]

I guess fragmentation could be an issue, but recording SD material is hardly intensive enough to stress a hard drive. If they can build a system that can record 10 SD streams all at the same time (and it's true, they have), and not have any hicups, then I doubt one tuner would have issues. I've been running my drives for 2+ years now, and have never defragmented the video drives (it's just a waste of time, and wears and tears on your hard drive for no benefit).

It sounds more like a hardware/driver issue. I have had driver issues with my PVR-500 before, which is why once I got it working, I have not upgraded the drivers at all. (This is where don't fix what's not broken really applies.)

[haus]

I'm trying the latest drivers and so far (after a day, which I don't consider a *really* reliable test until about 4-5 days have passed) so far so good. I'm using the latest ones from Hauppauge (24117 as of this writing).

For anyone who is having trouble with installing those drivers, Hauppauge's web site isn't totally clear. You do have to install the middleware before you can install the IR program, or the IR program will generate "unable to initialize infrared device". Their web site makes it sound like you have to install the middleware if you want to run their WinTV application, but the IR portion doesn't work if you fail to load the middleware. Why the "middleware" couldn't just have been rolled into the driver file I will never know. I'm sure there's a reason...

I've got plenty of space on my 80GB drive; it's somewhat fragmented but a new SATA drive in a 3GHz system...and a secondary SATA drive at that (no OS files...nothing else on the drive but a lone "SageTV" folder), I'd be surprised in this case if it's literally a throughput issue. I'm really hoping the latest drivers do the trick.

I want to note that I really appreciate people's thoughts on this matter and I'll post again to update this thread on whether the new drivers work. I completely agree with Geogecko on "if it ain't broke don't fix it".

[motobarsteward]

This may be a bit of a long shot, but I've got some network problems at the moment and my client keeps on auto-negotiating a 10meg connection instead of 100! When it does this, I do get intermittent stuttering. If I try to watch a HDD recorded DVD, this stuttering coincides with busy bit. Check your network throughput. I hope your not using WifI?

[haus]

Thanks, but no - this is on a machine running Sage itself, not Placeshifter. The analog cable plugs right into the PVR USB2, and that's it.

I have stuttering with Placeshifter if I don't pause before starting live TV, but that's an issue for another thread! One thing at a time...

That said, this is day two and I haven't encountered the purple and pink lines problem. I'm keeping my fingers crossed!

[geogecko]

LOL, looks like you may be on your way to having dual tuners then!