(Almost) No live tv with UNC paths

[Jesse]

Hi,

I am trying to move my recordings onto drives mapped using UNC paths in an effort to get comskip working on my clients. I have had some problems.

Foremost is live tv freezing. I have four capture devices. Two vbox usb ota tuners and two ATI 650 pci encoders (svideo from D* stb's). Live tv playback works just fine from the vbox usb tuners, but it will freeze when using the ATI 650 tuners. When using the default stv I can hit stop when playback freezes and the ui will hang for 2-3 minutes and then finally go back to the recordings menu. When using the sagemc stv only a hard reset will get me out of the freeze.

I tried changing the drivers for the ATI tuners but that did not help. I tried removing the non-unc mapped drives from the video recordings directory (leaving only the unc path directory which has about 130 gb of free space) but this made no difference. I then changed the directory path of the unc mapped drive to a local path (from \\\jukebox\\Sage0(J)\\SageRecJ to J:\SageRecJ ) and now I get no problem with live tv playback using the ATI tuners.

Does it matter that the unc path drives are a raid1 array on a 3ware 9500s-12 controller card? All the other drives used for recording are plugged directly into the mobo.

Could this be a network issue? Why would usb tuners work but not the pci tuners?

My sig details my hardware and software.

Thanks for any help.

Jesse

[Jesse]

Hi,

Not really knowing where to go with this I, of course, went to google. Pretty slim pickings, but I came up with this:

With the UNC name, your computer will actually ...

With the UNC name, your computer will actually query DNS for the ip of itself, unless that info is in the computers cache. Then it probably moves data to the pci bus and then to the disk controller. The extra copy time is because it thinks its moving it across a network connection so is probably buffering the sent packets.

Does this sound like a reasonable explanation for my problem? I am guessing that if this is it then it is the buffering that is the problem and not the query for an ip. If so, how would I stop the buffering? If it is the query then would something like a fixed ip solve this?

Help. TIA

Jesse

[megamojo]

Add entries in your hosts file for each machine that you have a UNC path for and it should help with your problem.

[Jesse]

Hi,

Add entries in your hosts file for each machine that you have a UNC path for and it should help with your problem.

I have never heard of the hosts file. Thanks for teaching me something new.

Since the unc pathed drives are located only on the server that is (apparently) slow writing to them, would I just add "127.0.0.1 localhost" to the hosts file?

Are you of the opinion that the ip request is the issue rather than the buffering? In any case, I cannot seem to turn up any info on how to control the buffering. There are quite a few advanced options for my nic, but none that directly mention buffering. As a matter of fact, I dont even know if the buffering has to do with the nic or to do with windows itself.

Thanks again.

Jesse

[megamojo]

Originally Posted by Jesse

Since the unc pathed drives are located only on the server that is (apparently) slow writing to them, would I just add "127.0.0.1 localhost" to the hosts file?

Jesse

Acutally, you want to add 127.0.0.1 jukebox or 192.168.x.x(the real ip) jukebox if the computer is named jukebox. Adding an entry for localhost wouldn't help becuase sage is looking for the computer name, not localhost.

[Jesse]

Hi,

Acutally, you want to add 127.0.0.1 jukebox or 192.168.x.x(the real ip) jukebox if the computer is named jukebox. Adding an entry for localhost wouldn't help becuase sage is looking for the computer name, not localhost

Thanks. Would it be better to use 127.0.0.1 since the actual ip of the machine could change, or should I assign a static ip to the server?

Sorry for all the elementary questions, but I know almost nothing about networking.

Thanks again!

Jesse

[megamojo]

127.0.0.1 should be fine.