Hiccups in playback on extender but not client

[wayner]

I have just set up a new SageTV for WHS server - I moved some tuners over from my previous setup on Vista HP and I bought a new, second HD-PVR. I am getting a weird playback problem but it only seems to affect Recorded or Live TV from one of my HD-PVRs - tuner 3 or HD-PVR1. The problem is that every 3-4 seconds of playback there is a slight pause or "hiccup" in playback - but this only occurs on my HD-200 extenders, not on SageClient! And this is consistent on different extenders (I have 4 of them).

This problem does not appear to be evident on files / live TV from my other HD-PVR. But if playback is fine on a client then it wouldn't be a problem with the source file/HD-PVR would it? But if that is the case why is it happening with only files from one of my two HD-PVRs?

This problem is occurring on my "old" HD-PVR that I have had for about 6 months. I haven't had problems like this before until very recently when one file played back very stutter, almost like slow motion, on my extenders but not on my SagePC. But that was just one recording - others were fine.

FYI - I have tried changing the resolution on the box connected to this HD-PVR from 108i to 720p.

I am running the 1230 firmware on my HD-200s.

Any suggestions? I will try swapping HD-PVRs so that the troublesome HD-PVR is connected to the other cable box to see if that makes any difference - this will put it back to 1080i as I believe that the other box is set for 1080i.

Anyone have any other ideas?

[egeller]

I think I am seeing the same issue on both of my 2 HD200's.

My motherboard went bad last week. I had an AMD dual core CPU and now have an Intel Core i7 processor on the new motherboard. Before the switch, all was wonderful (mostly).

When I finally got Sage working again last night I noticed the same stutter you describe on HD content.

Based on my early tests it's limited to HDHomeRun-recorded files. I intend on trying to reduce the HDHR's recording quality to see if that makes a difference.

My HD content from the HD-PVR plays just fine (although I've only had a chance to try one recording). My standard definition recordings all seem to play OK also.

I will be doing more testing tonight and I expect to file a bug report, unless someone can come up with a good suggestion and post it here.

BTW- I need to update the signature. I'm really on V6.5.6, not 6.5.1. I will also be trying an upgrade to 6.5.7 to see if that changes anything.

[dadof4]

Originally Posted by egeller

I think I am seeing the same issue on both of my 2 HD200's.

Based on my early tests it's limited to HDHomeRun-recorded files. I intend on trying to reduce the HDHR's recording quality to see if that makes a difference.

I don't think you will see a difference as HDHR's always record the actual stream and reducing the recording quality in setup has no affect.

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by dadof4

I don't think you will see a difference as HDHR's always record the actual stream and reducing the recording quality in setup has no affect.

Correct. You can not reduce the recording quality of any HD stream (the HDPVR does not capture the HD Stream but rather re-encodes an analog signal so that is why you can reduce its quality).

[egeller]

See http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=37999

I changed, in sage.properties, miniclient/network_buffer_size from 16K to 65536 and restarted Sage. The hiccups are no longer apparent in the video I was watching last night. I'm cautiously optimistic that this is the fix.

I also changed miniclient/network_buffer_size_new from 32K to 64K (65536) just because it was in the same neighborhood.

eg

[wayner]

I will try that but I am skeptical that this will fix the problem for me as I have two HD-PVRs and everything plays back fine from one of the HD-PVRs and I also have an OTA tuner and OTA content plays back fine and it uses more bandwidth than the H.264 files.