Live TV Stutter on 6.5.3

[Bohica]

I could only find one comment by Andy about live TV stuttering on 6.5.3 - where he suggested pausing it for a few seconds. Did not work for me. I upgraded many components of my system - so it made troubleshooting difficult.

I have 4 r5000hd Dish 211 receivers, and use the r5000 multi. I upgraded that component to the latest beta on their site, upgraded Jave to the latest, and upgraded Sage server to 6.5.3 (windows vista). Afterward, recorded files would play fine, but live would stutter no matter what I did on my clients (which I also upgraded).

After rolling back java, and the server, the clients would still stutter. I downgraded the clients and everything is back fine. I upgraded the server again to 6.5.3 and still have good live playback. I was convinced for a while this was a server issue. For now - will stay on clients 6.4.8.

[Bohica]

OK - scratch that. I had to downgrade the server as well. Live TV would begin to stutter after 30 minutes or so. Is noone else having live TV playback problems with the latest?

I did check the server - and it did not SEEM to be consuming a tone of memory or CPU...

[HawgGuy]

Did you change

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Frey Technologies\\Common\\DSFilters\\MpegDeMux so that Remux Buffers were increased from 40 (70-80 works for me).

[Bohica]

Yeah - that is part of my ritual for upgrading clients. This was not a client issue... as it affected existing clients that were playing fine... You have a very similar config - you using 6.5.3 with no problems?

[heffe2001]

Originally Posted by Bohica

Yeah - that is part of my ritual for upgrading clients. This was not a client issue... as it affected existing clients that were playing fine... You have a very similar config - you using 6.5.3 with no problems?

When it starts to stutter, did you happen to see the System (NT Kernel) using all available resources that sage wasn't? I've noticed that the past couple days (something's making the System process max the CPU).

[pilotguy7ca]

I'm having similar issue with livetv & my r5000's. I just upgraded to 6.5.5 and after about 20-30 minutes its starts to stutter like crazy. I have never had any issues like this before. I've tried bumping up the numbuffers in the registry to 100 (256) and I've tried using the stock STV, normally I'm using SageMC but I get the same results. I've noticed on the server that the processor jumps quite high when this happens (I'm running quad core 2.33 with 4gb ram).

[pilotguy7ca]

I put the MpegDemux from 6.4.8 on my client and my problems have appeared to go away.

What I've noticed while using the MpegDemux from 6.5.5 was that as soon as I start watching livetv on my client, the r5000.exe app on the server would start to consume more and more CPU and over about a 20 minute period it would get up to around 25% and then it would start to stutter on the client. The network data transfer would also start to decrease and stuttering would continue to get worse. The after a bit it would start to get better. The CPU usage would start to decrease and the network data would start to increase and stuttering would slowly get better over about the 20 minute time period.

While using the MpegDemux from 6.4.8 I noticed the same thing happening but not to the same extent, the CPU usage would only get up to about 20% over 20 minutes and then start to decrease back to a couple % over the same time and I would not get any stuttering.

The r5000 app normally only uses a few percent when it is recording and there is no client viewing it.

Also if watching live tv, but delayed enough that it starts recording the next show, when this happens the r5000 app drops back down to 1-2% CPU. So there must be something that Sage is doing to make it creep up and down while watching the same recording that the r5000 is actively recording.

[pilotguy7ca]

Nevermind, I got it working by finding an older thread about NOT using UNC with the r5000. I switched to drive letters from UNC and everything works great again. Interesting though that I've been able to use the r5000 with UNC drives for almost 2 years now without any issues while watching livetv up until the latest beta's.

[HawgGuy]

SageTV 6.5.5, Fresh XP3, Cyberlink - New MoBo with built in Nvidia 9400. Getting the stutter on live TV with VMR - smooth as silk with Overlay.