R5000-HD combined with Sage isn't recording right

[ojosch]

Well, I have reached the end of my stick here, and have run out of ideas before I give up on SageTV.

I've been a long time BeyondTV user for many years, and had always been curious to try SageTV. I got the chance to try it when I recently upgraded my Dish to the 211 model, which I had then sent to Nextcom for the R5000-HD mod. One more detail I should bring to the table is that I really don't care to use Sage for playback necessarily (although might eventually be a nice addition), as I for now, just use PowerDVD Ultra to play back most content, so the problems I have today strictly pertain to recording content that I am concerned about.

Here's my issue:

The R5000-HD seems to work fine all by itself (when I turn Sage off). But if I try to use SageTV to record anything via the R5000 capture device, I always get one, two, or both of the following results. When I get back to my computer to see how the recordings turned out, the computer is either hard-locked (completely froze- mouse wont even move), or if it's not locked up, the recordings are always broken up into several .ts files. So if I have an hour long show, then I might get 8-10 segments of that recording broken up into a bunch of smaller files. I AM recording onto an NTFS partition that supports large file sizes, so I do not know why SageTV is not just writing the entire program to a single file. Usually, I experience both of these issues. Meaning, I come home, check the computer, is locked up, so I reboot, then I inspect the recorded files, and see that they are fragmented into many small files with a similar title stamp (only 1 number changes in the several filenames) With these problems I am having, it is making it VERY hard to accept SageTV with open arms. I'm really trying to give it a fair chance.

I'm tempted to just use the default method to record shows that shipped with the R5000. But I wanted to use Sage because I can use the remote, with the intuitive UI to see program guide, browse Utube or whatever. Does anyone out there have any ideas for me to try before I pull the plug on STV? Like I said, if I just manually record shows with the R5000 program, computer never locks up, and always records into just a single .ts file until I manually press stop.

Mind you, this is a fresh install of XPpro SP2, with latest NV driver, latest ver. of Sage Media (6.2), and l have the R5000 interfaced with USB 2.0, and am using the 2.5f Sage Edition of R5000-HD software, etc. Machine is a P4 3.0gHz HT, Intel MB, 1.5G single channel RAM, Nvidia (by Asus) 7600GS, 3ware HW RAID controller, and I'm recording onto a 300GB RAID 1 NTFS partition currently, but I've tried it on a 500GB RAID 1 NTFS partition, and a 200GB RAID 1 NTFS partition (all were hardware RAID invisible to the OS) as well with the same exact result. Heck, I even tried it with a single drive connected to a local IDE with same result.

Any ideas? Am I overlooking some totally obvious problem here?

[GKusnick]

When files get broken up like that, it's usually a sign of signal loss or other capture failure, causing Sage to re-initialize the capture device periodically during recording. To get more details on what's going wrong, try enabling debug logging.

Also be aware (if you're not already) that this isn't an official support board. So before you give up and pull the plug, you might want to open an official support ticket to see if the folks at Sage have any info on your issue. They'll want to see debug logs, so that's another reason to leave logging enabled until you get everything working properly.

[ojosch]

Ok, I will give that a shot and see if the log will tell me what it is doing.

Hey if it is Sage restarting the recordings, is there any way to turn off that feature? Because the quality of the current recordings are actually very good, and I had what I thought to be satisfactory signal on my 211 receiver, and like I said, the R5000 doesn't restart any recordings when I manually record, and the shows always look pretty good, so if there is a way to disable Sage from having the power to stop and restart a recording, then I'd like to try that as well

But I will give debugging logs a try for now

Thanks

[chrisc16]

Did you say you are recording to .ts files? I believe that Sage prefers to wrap them as .mpg. I would suggest trying that.

-Chris

[ojosch]

Yeah I tried that too, and then what I get is the first file is .mpg, then the rest of the segments from a show (after SAGE started/stop/started many times), are all .ts files anyway. So an hour long show may have 8 files, the first one being a .mpg and the rest being .ts

Any other ideas? Thanks for the suggestion too by the way

I turned on the debugging log this morning and set several shows to record, so when I get home tonight, I will see what happens.

I also read here that some people had problems with the latest version of SAGE (6.2) locking up on them. Is there any way I can get a prior release of SAGE to try like 6.1 or earlier?

[chrisc16]

Originally Posted by ojosch

Yeah I tried that too, and then what I get is the first file is .mpg, then the rest of the segments from a show (after SAGE started/stop/started many times), are all .ts files anyway. So an hour long show may have 8 files, the first one being a .mpg and the rest being .ts

That's odd. I've never had Sage break up an R-5000 recording before, so I wonder if my server would do the same.

Originally Posted by ojosch

Any other ideas? Thanks for the suggestion too by the way

Are your drives formatted with a 64K block size? When Sage broke up my recordings before, it was because either I had used the default block size, or a drive was going bad. Since the R5000 app can record ok, it might be the block size. I think Sage is more sensitive to drive throughput than other software.

Originally Posted by ojosch

I also read here that some people had problems with the latest version of SAGE (6.2) locking up on them. Is there any way I can get a prior release of SAGE to try like 6.1 or earlier?

Try this link.

-Chris

[ojosch]

Originally Posted by chrisc16

Are your drives formatted with a 64K block size? When Sage broke up my recordings before, it was because either I had used the default block size, or a drive was going bad. Since the R5000 app can record ok, it might be the block size. I think Sage is more sensitive to drive throughput than other software.

You think it could be that? I DID see the advisory during install about this, but I thought it was just a setting to optimize things so that they lower their number of support calls. I didn't think that would have anything to do with my problem. I will go try to reformat using 64k blocks size and see if that plays any influence.

So this caused you to have the same problem w/ your R5000?
I just didn't think that would've been that big of an issue, but perhaps so huh?

Anyways, thanks for your suggestions

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by ojosch

You think it could be that? I DID see the advisory during install about this, but I thought it was just a setting to optimize things so that they lower their number of support calls. I didn't think that would have anything to do with my problem. I will go try to reformat using 64k blocks size and see if that plays any influence.

I just didn't think that would've been that big of an issue, but perhaps so huh?

Yes, it can be a very big issue, thus the recommendation that you mentioned on one of the configuration screens. When the cluster size is smaller, it can be impossible for the drive to seek to the next cluster quickly enough when the file is fragmented, so the drive can't keep up with the amount of video that needs to be read or written.

- Andy

[chrisc16]

Originally Posted by ojosch

So this caused you to have the same problem w/ your R5000?
I just didn't think that would've been that big of an issue, but perhaps so huh?

Not with my R5000, but when I first started recording HDTV, and a few SD streams at the same time, that's when I started having broken files. I had just forgot to set the block size on one of my recording drives. So yes, this could be the problem.

It shouldn't be causing the PC to lock up though, that's not good.

-Chris