Sage TV recordings wont play

[twistedsymphony]

I built a SageTV box as a Christmas gift, all of the hardware seems to be working properly without any conflicts, you can watch live TV and pause/rewind etc. and setting up scheduled recordings seems to work fine too.

Once a show gets recorded selecting it from the Recordings list simply has the sageTV loading icon pop up for about 30 seconds then go away without ever loading the recorded show.

after futzing with it using the remote, going in and out of menus but not really doing anything that should effect anything the Recordings screen (as well as several other screens) are now completely blank and SageTV refuses to go into standby.

the program is not frozen... even like this I can still watch live tv and go in and out the program guide.

I haven't yet rebooted but IMO that's not a real solution to a problem like this.

What's wrong and how do I fix it?

EDIT: Rebooting and everything works like normal, the machine was only running for about 15 hours before it started acting like this... before rebooting I also poked around the windows environment and can confirm that Sage TV was the only application not behaving properly.

[scoful]

Can you browse to the recordings through Windows and play them back with Windows Media Player or some other player type?

It's a little baffling that you can watch live tv - since everything in Sage is actually recorded.

What is your hardware setup?

[twistedsymphony]

I didn't try playing the recordings in WMP but once I rebooted the machine I was able to watch the recordings just fine in Sage.

really this felt like Sage got bunged up over time... after playing with it a bit more the extent of the weirdness was worse...

selecting most of the options from the main menu would not work it would take you to a blank recording screen with live TV playing in the corner... even selecting "standby" or pushing the standby button would take you to this screen.

watching Live TV would work but channel changing was flaky, with 9 out of 10 button pushes not responding. the guide would work and I could navigate the guide but selecting a channel for playback or recording would take me to the blank recorded shows screen.

this seemed to be the final resting functionality before I rebooted the machined and once it was back up everything was working exactly how it should.

I gave this as a gift to my fiancee, we set it up around noon on Christmas then went out to visit family, we played around with it a bit last night and it was working fine but hadn't yet recorded anything, then this morning it was screwed up right from the time it was taken out of standby.

HARDWARE:
GIGABYTE GA-MA69GM-S2H Motherboard (built in ATi Video, Realtek HD Audio, and Realtek LAN)
ATHLON 64 X2 4000+ EE - BRISBANE Processor
KINGSTON 2GB DDR2 667
Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150 w/ 45 button remote
LG Super Multi 18x SATA DVD Burner GSA-H62NK,
400GB Western Digital Caviar IDE Hard Drive
Antec earthwatts EA380 ATX12V v2.0 380W Power Supply

Running Windows XP

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by twistedsymphony

...it was screwed up right from the time it was taken out of standby.

May not make any difference but try it for a day or two with the computer on 24/7 or turned completely off in between - not standby - and see if it works better. If it does then you have an issue there and might be able to search for the cause. I've always had problems with my USB-UIRT and standby but I've never tried any of the possible solutions posted. I just got an extender (MVP and then STX-HD100) to fix it for me and I leave my Server on 24/7 in service mode. Many fewer problems that way for me.

[twistedsymphony]

The computer IS on 24/7

by "standby" I'm talking about the SageTV application... Windows is still running normally.

According to everything I've read you're supposed to put SageTV into standby whenever you're not watching so that it doesn't record live TV and neglect your scheduled recordings.

Another interesting thing I've discovered is that if you change channels too fast while watching Live TV Sage just locks up completely... I can do this consistently whenever I want to.

I'm pretty aggravated with this whole situation...

the WinTV application that came with the PVR works exactly like it should and for hours without problem... SageTV barfs within a few minutes if you happen to push buttons to fast or sometimes for no good reason..

Every piece of hardware and software works exactly as it should on this machine except SageTV...

Needless to say I'm no too happy with my choice in software.

If I don't even get so much as a conformation email for my tech request by the end of the week I'm nuking the whole installation and putting MythTV on there.

[gplasky]

Did you format your drives in 64K blocks? Anytime you "watch" something in SageTV it is recording to the hard drive. it sounds like you drive isn't keeping up. Make sure the drives are set and operating in DMA mode and not PIO mode. Check this out through Windows Device Manager. If your 400GB is the only drive I would create 2 partitions. One at 20 GB and format normally and load just the OS and apps on it. The second 350GB + partition format in 64k blocks and store the recordings and media on that. You can also load SageTV in service mode so that just runs in the background and records with no interface. Then just run the interface when you want to watch TV.

Gerry