Please Help Me Resolve MY Setup's Issues

[mskitty666]

I built my HTPC in December 2007. It's my first one, but not my first pc build. I think I've done an excellent job but there is still room for improvement. Here's what's in my setup now:
Case: Cooler Master CM Media 282
PSU: Enermax 600 watt
Motherboard: Biostar TF7050-M2
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3.0 Ghz
Ram: Crucial 2Gb DDR2 800Mhz
Hard Drives: Seagate DB35.3 750Gb IDE x1 SATA 3.0 x4
*IDE boot drive in 2 partitions 95GB for OS etc 4kb clusters
*all recording drives/partitions formatted in 64kb clusters
* added drives 1 at a time until final 2 added last week
Optical Drive: LiteON Lightscribe DVDRW
USB UIRT IR
Keyboard: Logitech Dinovo Mini
Universal Remote: Home Theater Master MX500
Tuners: Hauppauge HVR1800 & HVR1600

My biggest recurring problem has been stutter and jerk during HD playback. I tried the Nvidea Purevideo decoder as well as FFDShow. I've read many threads here regarding the issue and can not eliminate it. I've finally concluded it might be the graphics, but this mohterboard is supposed to be an HTPC MB with HD ready graphics. I am looking at graphics cards. I don't want to spend a lot of money. Newegg had several Radeon HD 4670 cards for around $100 or less. This seems to be the best card available for HD HTPC. Since my onboard GPU is Nvidia GeForce 7050PV I refuse to purchase an Nvidia card. The question is do I need the separate graphics or is my setup not tweaked properly?

I am also running into problems using my MX500 with my HD extenders. It learns the codes from the remotes but won't toggle. There seems to be something wrong with the way the extender remotes transmits the signals. It's supremely annoying and I'm hoping someone here has some ideas how to fix this other than buying a new remotes. These are for my upstairs tv's and not my main area. I used the Hauppauge remote that came with my tuner to program the MX500 in the living room. It works well, but the extender remote has some cool buttons the Hauppauge remote doesn't and I want them on my MX500! Suggestions please!

I am also looking for a way to make SageTV record to seperate drives when recording multiple shows at once. As I understand it SageTV records automatically to the drive with the most space. HATE This! Here's what's happening, My 3 oldest drives all have around 170Gb left. SageTV would record 2 or more shows to the same drive since it had more space. Later the same day it records 2 or more shows to another drive that now had more space. This keeps the files fragmented which does affect my performance. I added the last 2 drive at the same time. Same problem. I don't want to force different tuners to record to a specific drive because I have tuner priorities enabled. I just want SageTV to have the common sense to say "Hey I have 5 drives with space and need to record more than 1 show a the same time. Let me be smart and record each show to a seperate drive."

This is a problem because I have confirmed that when one drive is recording 2 or more shows, I am unable to watch any recorded shows from that drive during that time. Even standard tv stutters too badly to be viewable. These drives can record up to 10 simultaneous HD streams at once, but the specs don't say you'll get smooth playback at the same time. Is there a way to make this happen?


I'm concerned with decoders. I am trying out PowerDVD8 right now, but only the audio decoder appears as an option in SageTV. I'm reluctant to spend $99 when the software won't integrate with SageTV. Why won't the video decoders appear in SageTV?

Finally, I just started playing around with playing DVDs through SageTV. I don't know what is wrong but the audio is complete crap! I found a spdif bracket and hooked it up to my motherboard for optical out to my receiver. The sound was horrific. I get nightmares just thinking about it. I went back to using multi channel analog out. Even so DVDs sound to bad to be enjoyed and are very low on volume. Is that the price you pay for using onboard audio or am I just missing something here?

[bcjenkins]

Originally Posted by mskitty666

I built my HTPC in December 2007. It's my first one, but not my first pc build. I think I've done an excellent job but there is still room for improvement. Here's what's in my setup now:
Case: Cooler Master CM Media 282
PSU: Enermax 600 watt
Motherboard: Biostar TF7050-M2
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3.0 Ghz
Ram: Crucial 2Gb DDR2 800Mhz
Hard Drives: Seagate DB35.3 750Gb IDE x1 SATA 3.0 x4
*IDE boot drive in 2 partitions 95GB for OS etc 4kb clusters
*all recording drives/partitions formatted in 64kb clusters
* added drives 1 at a time until final 2 added last week
Optical Drive: LiteON Lightscribe DVDRW
USB UIRT IR
Keyboard: Logitech Dinovo Mini
Universal Remote: Home Theater Master MX500
Tuners: Hauppauge HVR1800 & HVR1600

My biggest recurring problem has been stutter and jerk during HD playback. I tried the Nvidea Purevideo decoder as well as FFDShow. I've read many threads here regarding the issue and can not eliminate it. I've finally concluded it might be the graphics, but this mohterboard is supposed to be an HTPC MB with HD ready graphics. I am looking at graphics cards. I don't want to spend a lot of money. Newegg had several Radeon HD 4670 cards for around $100 or less. This seems to be the best card available for HD HTPC. Since my onboard GPU is Nvidia GeForce 7050PV I refuse to purchase an Nvidia card. The question is do I need the separate graphics or is my setup not tweaked properly?

If I am reading correctly, you're using your server as a client as well. If possible consider separating the two functions. I have nothing current to compare to, regarding the HD4600s.

I am also running into problems using my MX500 with my HD extenders. It learns the codes from the remotes but won't toggle. There seems to be something wrong with the way the extender remotes transmits the signals. It's supremely annoying and I'm hoping someone here has some ideas how to fix this other than buying a new remotes. These are for my upstairs tv's and not my main area. I used the Hauppauge remote that came with my tuner to program the MX500 in the living room. It works well, but the extender remote has some cool buttons the Hauppauge remote doesn't and I want them on my MX500! Suggestions please!

I would try setting this

rc5_disable=true

in the hwmacaddress.properties file for the extender in the clients directory.

I am also looking for a way to make SageTV record to seperate drives when recording multiple shows at once. As I understand it SageTV records automatically to the drive with the most space. HATE This! Here's what's happening, My 3 oldest drives all have around 170Gb left. SageTV would record 2 or more shows to the same drive since it had more space. Later the same day it records 2 or more shows to another drive that now had more space. This keeps the files fragmented which does affect my performance. I added the last 2 drive at the same time. Same problem. I don't want to force different tuners to record to a specific drive because I have tuner priorities enabled. I just want SageTV to have the common sense to say "Hey I have 5 drives with space and need to record more than 1 show a the same time. Let me be smart and record each show to a seperate drive."

This is a problem because I have confirmed that when one drive is recording 2 or more shows, I am unable to watch any recorded shows from that drive during that time. Even standard tv stutters too badly to be viewable. These drives can record up to 10 simultaneous HD streams at once, but the specs don't say you'll get smooth playback at the same time. Is there a way to make this happen?

You can specify a recording path for each tuner. Not ideal but it would let you spread them out. I would send in a feature request to SageTV though on doing a sanity check prior to recording to make sure it is using a drive which is not currently being recorded to.

I'm concerned with decoders. I am trying out PowerDVD8 right now, but only the audio decoder appears as an option in SageTV. I'm reluctant to spend $99 when the software won't integrate with SageTV. Why won't the video decoders appear in SageTV?

What version of SageTV?

Finally, I just started playing around with playing DVDs through SageTV. I don't know what is wrong but the audio is complete crap! I found a spdif bracket and hooked it up to my motherboard for optical out to my receiver. The sound was horrific. I get nightmares just thinking about it. I went back to using multi channel analog out. Even so DVDs sound to bad to be enjoyed and are very low on volume. Is that the price you pay for using onboard audio or am I just missing something here?

On my one client PC, I use AC3 Filter with SageTV and use optical out. Works great.

HIH

B

[Clift]

From experience I can tell you that the 7050PV is NOT up to the task of HD. Even though it has build-in HDMI I never got it working smoothly... XP or Vista. I suggest not shying away too much from NVIDIA as ATi has their issues as wll. My suggestion? Get a fanless card with a monster heatsink so you don't inroduce more noise etc. I have found that a good fanless setup (I like MSI's, for exaple) can be better than a small fan with a useless heatsink (Chaintech 8600GT, for example). For playback of MPEG-2 with hardware acceleration a Radeon HD-anything will work, and so will a GeForce 7xxx or higher. BUT, I recommend getting something that has H.264 acceleration. The HD4670 should work great. Here I have listed some cards that will be more than enough to get the job done at not-a-lot-of-money:

Radeon HD3450 fanless:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814161231
The nice thing about the above card is that it has the built-in HDMI, with an onboard audio controller! So you can actually get HD-audio, as it's called (5.1) through the HDMI connection.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814121243

ATi Radeon HD3650 with fan
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814261021
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814161221

NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814121097

[mskitty666]

f I am reading correctly, you're using your server as a client as well. If possible consider separating the two functions.

I might consider doing that in the future, but I have confirmed the same issues exist on my HD Extenders even when the SageTV server is not in use.

I would try setting this rc5_disable=true in the hwmacaddress.properties file for the extender in the clients directory.

I will try this out this weekend. Thanks.

You can specify a recording path for each tuner.

That's what I thought. I was hoping there was another alternative. I guess I'll specify the paths and babysit drive space.

What version of SageTV?

6.3.10.166

On my one client PC, I use AC3 Filter with SageTV and use optical out. Works great.

My motherboard doesn't have optical or coaxial out. It has a spdif header. I was having no luck finding a spdif bracket on the net. Luckily, when I went to install my new drives, I went through my graveyard of extra pc parts and voila! A spdif bracket that came with some motherboard somewhere that I hadn't used. I too use AC3 filter, but I only get pcm stereo and it is very tinny and echoy and that's with optical connection. I got frustrated and just hooked up the analog, but I will be looking in to this.

Clift, thanks for all the info. It's nice to know I'm not losing my mind. I'm just really upset because now I have to buy an x16 card and that slot was supposed to be for another tuner Biostar should have been more clear about what type of HD this will support. I didn't know it mattered. The cards you have suggested are all what I'm looking at right now,but I'll go as top of the line as I can without breaking the bank. My desktop has an 8800 GTX. When I thought about a card for SageTV, it was made clear that the 8600 performed better for HD playback. I'm interested in the 9600 series if I go with Nvidia. Know anything about how they perform for HTPC?

[bcjenkins]

Make sure you have set AC3Filter to pass through. Otherwise it will try to re-encode everything for you.

Also, consider upgrading to SageTV 6.4. I think it supports the new Cyberlink decoder values out of the "box". You can also manually add them. There is a thread here on the boards talking about pdvd7 I think that covers the same thing.

B

[mskitty666]

Where would I go to set AC3 filter to pass through?

I was thinking of updating, but it's such a pain in the but trying to find a changelog for SageTV. I only update if it is going to fix a problem I have or give me features I want. Otherwise why mess with a good thing.

[kevine]

Originally Posted by mskitty666

I might consider doing that in the future, but I have confirmed the same issues exist on my HD Extenders even when the SageTV server is not in use.

Hold on spending any money until you get this problem resolved. The stuttering problem may not even be your onboard video if you have the problem on an HD extender too. Shut down the SageTV client on the server completely and following below.

Start at the beginning. Your cable into the house. Well, I assume you cable but the the premise is the same even if you use OTA. Signal strength. I spent months trying to figure out my stutter problem. Turned out to be the cable signal level was too low. If you have a cable modem, you can check the signal strength with that. Then make sure you have a good amplified splitter to split 4 times. Search the forum for many good suggestions on signal level.

Next after you have confirmed the signal is good, move on to the tuners without Sage. Watch a channel (HD) with the software from the cards live. Does it stutter there? Both cards? Upgrade drivers, etc.

When you have that worked out, move the the next in the chain. Use the software that came with the card to make a recording. After complete, watch it. If this is a problem. It is drives, operating system, etc. Is your AV software scanning files as they are being recorded? I know people have had a problem with this as well.

Then move on to Sage, decoders, etc. You will be remise if you do not upgrade to 6.4 as previously suggested. That is the current release version.

With regard to your spreading out on recording drive dilemma, look here for directions on manually moving your current recordings around to distribute equally to the all the drives. Make all the recording directories even with space free. This will also solve your problem too and you may want to then set tuners to specific drives as well. The problem with specific drives is HD file size are a lot bigger than SD. Think about this when coming up with your schema.

[Djc208]

Originally Posted by mskitty666

Where would I go to set AC3 filter to pass through?

I was thinking of updating, but it's such a pain in the but trying to find a changelog for SageTV. I only update if it is going to fix a problem I have or give me features I want. Otherwise why mess with a good thing.

Might want to try subscribing to the Announcements thread http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=34995
it will tell you when the new version is released an link to the change log. There is also a notification thread in the BETA area, which is where all the changes are listed as each beta is released.

[mskitty666]

Hold on spending any money until you get this problem resolved. The stuttering problem may not even be your on board video if you have the problem on an HD extender too. Shut down the SageTV client on the server completely and following below.

I have systematically eliminated several different causes that contributed to my stuttering problem, trying to watch a recorded show from a drive that's currently recording tow or more programs, minor stutter as comskip first loads after finishing a bunch of recordings and some other minor issues. I will run some tests this weekend to see if I now get the problem still on the HD Extenders.

Start at the beginning. Your cable into the house. Well, I assume you cable but the the premise is the same even if you use OTA. Signal strength.

Well, I use to think all my cable problems were due to my crappy cable company. That was until I bought my Electroline Drop Amp http://www.electroline.com/en/produc..._ft/index.html
Based on recommendations found in numerous online forums, I decided to buy one of the best. This has one in eight out with 3db amplification, guaranteed zero signal loss and fully compatible with cable modems and other interactive services. My apartment had only two outlets and I use one of these at each. My HVR1800 shows 100% signal strength and all my previous cable problems disappeared.

Next after you have confirmed the signal is good, move on to the tuners without Sage.

I hadn't thought to check without using SageTV. Um, have you seen the WinTV software that comes with these Hauppauge cards? It's supremely inferior and I did my best to forget it even existed once my lovely SageTV was loaded. I guess I'll suffer through testing it out there, hadn't occurred to me to do so.

With regard to your spreading out on recording drive dilemma, look here for directions on manually moving your current recordings around to distribute equally to the all the drives.

Thanks for the direct link, but this girl will NOT be playing musical mpegs My three oldest drives are pretty even and I stopped SageTV recording to them until the new ones catch up. I have about 400GB free on each of the new drives so it won't be long.

This will also solve your problem too and you may want to then set tuners to specific drives as well.

I will be doing that soon so that my shows record to different drives.

The problem with specific drives is HD file size are a lot bigger than SD.

Ha! Not if you are using the max quality setting. With all my hard drive space, I bumped up the recording quality. Each SD show is around 5GB and my HD recordings are around 6GB. Not an issue here.

Might want to try subscribing to the Announcements thread

Thanks for the tip. I will subscribe. I still think it's weird that the changelog isn't listed in the program description or on the downloads page.

[bcjenkins]

If you install the full package from: http://ac3filter.net/ There is a control applet in there. I don't recall is SageTV bundles it in.

B

[mskitty666]

SageTV does not bundle it in. Thanks for the direct link.

[kevine]

Just 1 more thought is to check to see if you signal is too high. That is also possible. Rare but possible.

I really did not give you a clear picture of my signal problems. It was not just the amplified splitter that I had to fix. It was all my cables as well. I had 1 bad cable (coincidently going into the amplified splitter) and replaced it. That is when my problems went away. The cable splice had 1 of the copper strands touching the core and that gave me signal loss. Now I have Quad shield RG6 with good quality compression connectors for all. Also terminating the unused ports. What I did was split my cable with 1x2 regular splitter just inside the house. 1 went to cable modem and the other to the amp splitter. I then used the modem to check the signals knowing then that is exactly what was going in my amplified splitter. Cable modem=poor man's cable tester.

Good luck.

[mskitty666]

Someone else has suggested that my signal strength might be too high. My HVR1600 only gets about 79% strength. The cables are all newly purchased within the last year from http://www.monoprice.com. Once I found this site I went crazy! All new RG6, all new Cat6, all new audio and video cables as well. There's no such thing as too many extra cables. I even have component cables and don't own an HDTV yet. I do use terminators on unused ports, but my amp is so good that even with no terminators there was no signal leak. Not so with my previous splitter.

[mskitty666]

I updated to 6.4 and installed AC3. As I was told my audio now sounds fantastic out through spdif and the Cyberlink video decoder appeared. Two fantastic steps in the right direction so thanks very much for the help. Today I get to play with the properties file but I can't test anything because my drives are defragging.

[ghostlobster]

A couple tips...
I know it's been said in here before, but give serious consideration to setting up a full client/server relationship. Let your sage server just handle recording and storage and set up clients to handle playback. The server does not need a lot of horsepower, nor does it need any real video subsystem. Mine's running headless with just a garbage integrated Intel video subsystem. Since I went to this setup, the only issues I've had have been related to my own idiocy, or the cable box deciding to lock up (thanks Time Warner!)

Also, I did not see what OS you are using. If you're running Vista and having any audio/video issues, I highly recommend enabling the Microsoft A/V decoders as a baseline. Very stable, and not too bad from a performance standpoint. I've set all my clients up with the MS audio decoders, followed Babgvant's docs for properly configuring S/PDIF passthrough, and it's been perfect! For video, I've been flip-flopping between Cyberlink and MS...for now, I'm on Cyberlink PDVD7, but that can change daily depending upon my mood.

[mskitty666]

Well, I shut down SageTV and specified a separate recording drive for each tuner. With all the drives defragged I expected no problems. I turned ComskipMonitor back on and all was and we sat down to catch up on shows. Everything was fine watching the first show then half way through the second stutter, on SD! Now my next thing to check was the antivirus.

I had excluded all my recording directories, but also went in and excluded sagetv.exe and comskip.exe. I got worse. Now I'm testing with real time file monitoring off and will see how things go.

I am using Windows XP SP2. And I was miffed at having to buy yet another os from Evilsoft.

[mskitty666]

I've updated SageTV, Hauppauge Drivers,Java, increased JVM heap size to 533, specified a separate recording drive for each tuner and I can't stop the stutter. Even worse, recently many shows aren't just stuttering but they are skipping severely and playing too fast. When I say skipping severely, I mean the skip is so bad that many seconds and sometimes minutes are gone. Gone! Totally unwatchable! We were watching Supernatural and about 19 minutes into it the show started playing too fast, audio and video unwatchable. This video plays the same in VLC, WMP and Real Player.

I downloaded trials of both Video Redo and Mpeg Video Wizard. I tried quickstream fix but the video still plays badly. It did find over 18,000 errors. Seems like a lot. I also tried the gop fixer and it didn't fix it. Last time I tried these programs on broken videos it fixed them and they were worse than the files I'm trying to fix now.

My main concern is how can I fix the video? These are must see shows and I don't want to have to watch them over the net on my computer.

I also don't understand why this is happening now. All this after I upgraded SageTV and changed my recording quality to max. Could either one of these changes cause this?

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by mskitty666

I've updated SageTV, Hauppauge Drivers,Java, increased JVM heap size to 533, specified a separate recording drive for each tuner and I can't stop the stutter. Even worse, recently many shows aren't just stuttering but they are skipping severely and playing too fast. When I say skipping severely, I mean the skip is so bad that many seconds and sometimes minutes are gone. Gone! Totally unwatchable! We were watching Supernatural and about 19 minutes into it the show started playing too fast, audio and video unwatchable. This video plays the same in VLC, WMP and Real Player.

I downloaded trials of both Video Redo and Mpeg Video Wizard. I tried quickstream fix but the video still plays badly. It did find over 18,000 errors. Seems like a lot. I also tried the gop fixer and it didn't fix it. Last time I tried these programs on broken videos it fixed them and they were worse than the files I'm trying to fix now.

My main concern is how can I fix the video? These are must see shows and I don't want to have to watch them over the net on my computer.

I also don't understand why this is happening now. All this after I upgraded SageTV and changed my recording quality to max. Could either one of these changes cause this?

Have you tested your hard drives to make sure that you do not have an issue with bad hard drives or a bad controller? Have you verified your signal strength? If you are really recording to seperate hard drives and are using 64k cluster sizes, then you shouldn't be having these issues. Are you seeing this studdering on the HD100's?


If you are seeing the studdering on your server, its due to the poor graphics, but if you are seeing it also on the HD100's still then there is something wrong with your server.....I recommend using one the many bench marking programs such as BurnInTest to see if what kind of thoroughput you are getting on your hard drives.....

[Conejo]

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that your signal levels are the issue, that the SYMBOL Quality is so badly mangled as to make interpretation and packet assembly impossible. The issue sounds as if it's created before the file is written to disk.

You may want to try this test:
1. Exit SageTV (and the SageTV Service, if in use)
2. Start up the Hauppauge WinTV 2000 application.
3. See if you can get a consistent viewable HD program.
4. Check your Signal, SNR and Quality levels.
- To check for low signal issues: run a cable from your demarc point (where it comes into the house/apartment/trailer/cardboard_box) direct to the test card (no splitters/amps) and see what your signal and quality levels are. Then preview an HD show for a while to see if there is any improvement.

If this is stable, then repeat the test using SageTV.
Note: you may need to remove a tuner from SageTV Source Setup to test a specific tuner. If you back up your wiz.bin (always advisable) and your sage.properties file first then you can replace your sage.properties when done and be returned to your original configuration and settings.

1. Physically remove (or use Setup Sources to remove) all the tuners except for the test tuner.
2. Open SageTV and from the GUIDE select an HD program to watch now (watch live/record).
3. Watch this for breakups.
4. You can also pull up TASK MANAGER and select the Performance tab to watch CPU, or use Administrative Tools > Performance to monitor several activity points. You should notice low usage while recording, medium to high when viewing (depending on your Video Card and Decoder).
5. Play back the same file to verify a good recording. It should be no different from watching it live.

QUESTION: Did running the cable to the single tuner improve your signal, watchability?

[Conejo]

Originally Posted by mskitty666

Ha! Not if you are using the max quality setting. With all my hard drive space, I bumped up the recording quality. Each SD show is around 5GB and my HD recordings are around 6GB. Not an issue here.

Ya know, earlier this year I replaces a failed recording drive with a 750GB I got on sale, so thought, "Why not allow the SD cards to encode at the HIGHEST rate?" So I set my old PVR-500 to MPEG2 Max Quality (5.9GB/hr) and a week later notices all the subsequent recordings had errors that Video-Redo couldn't fix. My HDHR recordings were fine. Back to BEST (3.0 GB/hr) I went!

So now I tell myself that I'm not really bothered by any mpeg artifacts, they're there to keep me humble. Yea, that's it.