Not Enough?

[pat_smith1969]

New Sage User here...

In my new house I am hoping to centralize my tv viewing. See my current server config below. Currently I am having VERY high cpu utilizations. Checking the processes I see that SageTV is running at 100pct. It gets especially bad when I try to use my MVP. I read the "how I got my Sage to not stutter even at 1080i" thread. that helped a lot but I still get stuttering when navigating menus and such in SageTV. I even dropped the recording quality down. After the tweaking Sage runs pretty well, though still a bit slow in the menus (running default GUI).

My plan is to put both two tuner Hauppauge PCi cards in the server and configure the HDHomerun as well. My concern is that the server CPU is not beefy enough to handle FOUR SD tuner cards and two HD tuner cards. The server will be responsable for running my main TV (hooked up through my reciever). I will have two, maybe three Media MVP clients.

Current setup.
Server:
P4 2.4ghz cpu with 2gigs ram. System drive is a 80gig sata2 drive. data drive is a RAID5 1.3T array run by a PCI RAID controller. Windows MCE 2005 OS. Hauppauge two tuner pci card, I also have a HDHomerun. Nvidia Geforce FX 5200.

Bedroom PC:
Sempron 3.4ghz 2 gigs of Ram with a 320 SATA datadrive. Hauppauge two tuner PCI card.

Other:
Hauppauge Media MVP.

[paulbeers]

Your server should be just fine for a headless sage server. The FX5200 will not fly for HDTV, but otherwise you should be fine. Have you tried reinstalling Sage? When are you seeing the high cpu usage? Are you watching anything thru Sage at the time? Or are you seeing high usage even when just recording?

[Lucas]

You should not be getting 100% utilisation.

As above, the server is more than adequate.

When not playing any video on your server, CPU util should not be getting above 20-30% max even when all tuners are recording.

When you are using the MVP and the video you are viewing is not in Mpeg2 format, the server has to transcode it.
If the video is HD or avi, the CPU util will climb up. There is a setting for MVP trancode quality, high or standard.
With your server, you will not be able to transcode HD video to the MVP smoothly. I am on the borderline with my 2.8Ghz HT P4 and I run standard quality.

When you see 100%, is your Server SageTV interface at the Menu?
Or are you running the SageTV Service?
Please tell us more so that we can come to some deductions.
I suspect that you are trying to play a video on your SageTV server and you probably have the default SageTV Decoder enabled.

What's your Java version?
The recommended is 1.4.11 or even the latest 1.6.
Make sure you don't have Java 1.5.

[carlgar]

I have seen this 100% usage issue and sent a log file to support. I even let it run for about 20 hours to see if it ever completes, it did not. When I see this occur I just shutdown sage and restart which seems to be the only work around. Actually, what I see is 100% for about 25 seconds, then normal usage for about 5 and then it repeats.

[wrems]

Another thing to double check is that MCE is not conflicting with Sage. Run a Google search on permanently disabling MCE, I can’t remember exactly how to do it but it's easy to do.

[pat_smith1969]

I think I solved some of my utilization issues. I dropped my record quality from MPEG2 max Quality 5.9 GB/HR to DVD Long Play 2.4GB/hr. That seemed to help a lot. I also dropped my Media Extneder Conversion Quality from High to Standard. Now with both the Server playing live TV and the MVP playing TV I am at about 40pct utilization, that is MUCH better.

In the post about how to stop video stuttering said to use VMR9 as a renderer, but when I use that I get some viedo tearing so I am thinking of going back to Overlay. The MPEG2 decoder I am using is the NVIDIA video decoder (should I be using NVIDIA Post Processor instead?). All others are set to default. DScaler Deinterlacing is disabled... Should it be enabled?

I HAD both Java 1.5 and 1.6 installed and assumed java would use the latest version. I uninstalled version 1.5 and it seems to be using 1.6 now.


So that leaves for me to test recording HD tv with the HDHomerun.


Are you guys sure that this server will be able to record 4 or 6 channels at a time AND have two MVPs watching either TV or my DIVX recorded movies? That seems like a lot.

I will upgrade my vid card so it can display TV easier from my server.

[Lucas]

Originally Posted by pat_smith1969

I think I solved some of my utilization issues. I dropped my record quality from MPEG2 max Quality 5.9 GB/HR to DVD Long Play 2.4GB/hr. That seemed to help a lot. I also dropped my Media Extneder Conversion Quality from High to Standard. Now with both the Server playing live TV and the MVP playing TV I am at about 40pct utilization, that is MUCH better.

In the post about how to stop video stuttering said to use VMR9 as a renderer, but when I use that I get some viedo tearing so I am thinking of going back to Overlay. The MPEG2 decoder I am using is the NVIDIA video decoder (should I be using NVIDIA Post Processor instead?). All others are set to default. DScaler Deinterlacing is disabled... Should it be enabled?

I HAD both Java 1.5 and 1.6 installed and assumed java would use the latest version. I uninstalled version 1.5 and it seems to be using 1.6 now.


So that leaves for me to test recording HD tv with the HDHomerun.


Are you guys sure that this server will be able to record 4 or 6 channels at a time AND have two MVPs watching either TV or my DIVX recorded movies? That seems like a lot.

I will upgrade my vid card so it can display TV easier from my server.

I think your main issue the transcoding of DIVX movies. You may have trouble playing 2 concurrently.

You should use the Nvidia decoder. The post processor does not use the hardware. Your card may not support VMR9 smoothly so your best bet is overlay.

[mayamaniac]

On standard quality for the MVP, his CPU should be able to handle 2 Divx transcoding at once. I've tested this once with the same CPU as his.

[pat_smith1969]

Here is an update...
I watched TV for a while last night. After a few hours the SageTV utilization went through the roof again. It stayed there until I ended the process and restarted Sage. This problem is a little different from my problem before because I can watch TV and use the MVP and only have 60pct utilization most of the time, then it will suddenly run out of control.

I am investigating the possability that it is my HDHomerun doing it. It has not been working well lately(with sage). Sometimes I can tune into a channel and watch HDTV (though it is a little choppy) and other times it says there is no signal. When It cannot find a signal my PC slows to a crawl and I have to stop the sage process to get control back again.

I have ordered a better video card, I picked up a 6600GT for 50$ from ebay. I love that card, I use it in my gaming machine and it has worked well for years.

BTW ... The reason I picked sage (one of them anyways) was because during the 15 day trial I always got answers to my posts, promptly, acurately, and politely. The Sage community was what sold Sage to me. Thanks guys/gals

[pat_smith1969]

BTW...
Prior to my original post I went through all the steps to disable MCE. I even went so far as to allow me to use the "Guide" button on my MCE remote without it kicking off MCE.

And I told Mcafee to not run On Access Scan on the directory that the recordings go into, so that is not the problem.