SageTV "pause" every hour (test pattern)

[Bill_Mackintosh]

I'm using the trial version of SageTV, attempting to determine if it's the right software for me. I have a PVR-350, and noticed that every hour on the hour for about 1 second the software will display the "test pattern" color bars. I'm assuming that this is the guide updating that's causing this. I have an Athlon 1.2GHz w/512MB of RAM running Windows XP Pro SP1a (plus all patches and hotfixes) and ATA133 hard drives. Is this a known problem or is my setup special in some way? :P If this is a known problem, does anyone know if it will be corrected in version 2 of the software. I like SageTV so far, except for this one annoying "feature"

[falchulk]

Is this just with 1hr or 30 minute shows? Sage closes the file it is writing to when the show ends. On most systems the picture just freezes for 3 to 5 seconds. Maybe the 350 outputs a test pattren when there is no signal output?

[Bill_Mackintosh]

It seems to just be with one hour shows. I notice that it happens at the 59 minute mark most consistently (59 minutes by the clock on the ancient magnetic reel to reel recording devices I keep as momentos of a past era) LOL I hope this gets corrected in version 2 as it's most annoying! I think I'll post a question regarding this in the Beta forum.

[AJ Bertelson]

My 250 pauses for just a second. It happens at the end of every show.

[falchulk]

Its not the 250 that pauses. Its the way sage handles the mpeg stream. The pause is when the old file is closed and the new one opened.

[Bill_Mackintosh]

Ah, this goes back to a previous post of mine where I suggested that SageTV should handle the "Live TV" portion of the program as MythTV does. If it had a buffer file that it constantly overwrote, and only created other files when you selected record, that would seem to be a better system. I may try and go back and try to get MythTV working again. Having a test pattern appear every hour would get QUITE annoying.

[ErsatzTom]

This is the way TiVo works too and I can honestly say that I don't miss it. It took a little mental readjustment but now I wouldn't have it any other way. I think Sage could still use a little tweaking in the way it handles "live tv" recorded files but I wouldn't want them to change it to a buffer scheme.

I haven't heard anyone else mention a test pattern before so maybe this is something that could be fixed. If it is a product of using the tv out on the 350 I would think that 2.0 would quite possibly address it since they have clearly put some work into 350 tv out as it supports osd in 2.0.

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