Are we ever going to get rid of the "pause"? YES WE DID!

[DOS64K]

I suppose when the PERFECT PVR comes along, with the PERFECT setup routine, and the PERFECT feature set, oh and a PERFECT user interface, with of course, the PERFECT WAF I'll jump up and by it because it's also PERFECTLY priced!

But until that day comes, I'll be PERFECTLY content with SageTV - warts and all

[Brent]

But having the discussion - even with dissent is very important to the process.

I'm in the "pause" is no big deal camp, but I learn from this sort of discussion/debate and I think it might even encourage the devs to take another look at things to see if they can improve it. While I might sound pretty adamant about my point of view and might even get cranky about things at times, I really think the discussion is a good one. That's my 1.5 cents anyway

[MitchSchaft]

The pause is definately NOT a deal breaker. Sage4Lif!

[brewston]

Is this pause when the screen goes blank ? I've always thought it was my aerial !

[MeInMaui]

FYI

There may be some things that can be done to try to reduce the severity of the pause. Here are several properties you could try changing in your sage.properties file on your server that might help. (shut down sage first and backup up the original)

seeker/fast_mux_switch=true
videoframe/fast_file_switching=true
videoframe/safe_fast_file_switching=false
videoframe/local_encoding_to_playback_delay=0

These may not all work for any given tuner, so some experimenting with combinations of settings might be necessary. Also check in Detailed Setup to make sure sage is not set to force a channel change for every recording.

Aloha,
Mike

[DOS64K]

Originally Posted by Brent

But having the discussion - even with dissent is very important to the process.

My post was mostly intended to be "tounge-in-cheek", and I do agree that dissent, disagreement and the rest of the 'dis' family play a large role in this community.
What I find facinating at times is the level of expectation and comparison done with other PVRs (ie. why doesn't Sage do this like VMC or as well as MCE, etc.). If I'm not mistaken, a poll was taken awhile back asking what PVR folks had migrated to Sage from. Aside from the long list of other PVR software/hardware, the most interesting message from the results was the fact the the overwhelming majority of folks had come FROM ANOTHER PRODUCT to Sage because of real or perceived lack of capability, compatibility or configurability. To then become frustrated by something like the pause and make comparisons to the product they abandoned seems odd.
Again, my intent wasn't to stifle the creative process, but rather to comment on the realities of this hobby we all enjoy.

[Brent]

Originally Posted by DOS64K

My post was mostly intended to be "tounge-in-cheek", and I do agree that dissent, disagreement and the rest of the 'dis' family play a large role in this community.

I know
I didn't really mean that as a direct response to you per se', just a general statement.

[stanger89]

OK, I'll throw my fuel on the fire.

I guess I've never understood what the fascination is with watching "live" TV through a PVR at all. It just seems to add unnecessary complexity. I know when I had cable, I just ran another line to the TV, and if I wanted to just "watch TV" I'd just fire up the TV and tune a channel.

Now that I've got Dish, if I watched any significant amount of "Live" TV, I'd ether get a dual-tuner box and use the TV2 or just get an extra box. The whole "Pause live TV" idea seems to be the most missplaced and about the least useful PVR feature even though it often gets the most press.

And just for some perspective, since my Dish "tuner" is an HD PVR, I've got a good 5-6 second "pause" on a show change and it doesn't really bother me at all since I hardly watch anything live beyond maybe a bit of the news (and thus no show change).

I guess to get back to my "fuel on the fire":

Why not just watch live TV directly, and not through Sage at all?

Oh yeah, and this tactic has the great advantage of not screwing up your IR (Intelligent Recording) profile with a bunch of garbage you happened to watch but not really care about

Originally Posted by Brent

With all of that being said, I think a circular buffer IS possible within SageTV as long as I'm understanding this stuff correctly. But it would require some work using this API called WatchLive. So maybe it could be done as an option for the LiveTV-with-No-Pause-crowd.

There's a very high probability that that won't work with all hardware, and may not work with Extenders. That's another issue that makes the "buffer" idea very, very difficult for Sage, extenders.

Sage is designed from the ground up to be a distributed, client-server architecture. It's designed for arbitrary clients to connect to a server and watch anything available.

What happens if two clients decide to watch the same show "live", and then one decides to watch something else live? Today, they just play that recording file off the server's HDD and the server keeps recording it, using only one tuner. Now if one client wants to change to a different live show, Sage starts a new, second recording, no interruption to the other user.

If Sage used a buffer system, it would have to either forbid the change because someone else is using the file, change the channel for both viewers (who may not be at the same place), or always start a new buffer for each client. The later is sub-optimal because it takes up more tuners than necessary. What if you've got only one tuner for digtal cable, and two people want to watch the same show live, that would be impossible if each client were to get it's own buffer.

I'm all for reducing or eliminating the "pause" as long as it doesn't mean re-writing the way SageTV handles recordings. Add an option - fine. Reduce the pause - fine. Change to circular buffer - not so much.

I agree completely. If Sage can "fix" the pause, so much the better it would make Sage a more polished product. But in the client/server/extender, unlimited tuner/client architecture of Sage, that's easier said than done.

In the scheme of things though the following things seem a little higher on the priority list:
1. UI Improvement
2. More Online Media Access from within SageTV
3. Improving the usability and ease of installation/settings
4. Music functionality improvement
5. Photo functionality improvement
6. DTS Downmix for HD200!!!! PLEASE!

But yeah, that's just my laundry list

Hey, don't forget HBR decoding for Blu-ray's

Originally Posted by ruwackd

I may be a bit naive here but why would you need to lose any portion of the recording when pressing record while watching LiveTV if using a circular buffer? Why not just have the circular buffer file become the recorded file rather than creating the recording file from the point at which "record" was pressed?

I'm not going to say it's "impossible" but here are some of the complexities of the problem:

• Your buffer file may not be in the same place as the recording should go.
• The filename is different - how do you change the filename while the file is being accessed?
• How do you cut excess time while the file is being accessed.
• What do you do if you change the channel, throw the contents away, append the new contents?
• How big should the buffer be?

In some ways Sage's approach may seem cheap and rudimentary, but if you take the time to sit back and look at the problem, it's IMO a very simple and elegant solution to the problem. It solves essentially all the issues of the buffer design in a simple, easy way and 'only' introduces the "pause" issue.

Sure for that one recording you could have several minutes of extra time in the recording but that would be much more acceptable to me than to miss any part of the recording

Now this I wonder about. I don't think I've ever lost part of a recording due to the file switching that wasn't cut because of the schedule anyway.There's two issues coming up in this thread I think, and they are far from the same thing. There's the issue of the pause during live TV, and then the issue of lost chunks of recordings due to the EPG indicating the show changing.

Eliminating the pause would not fix shows getting cut. The only way to fix that is to use padding. And the only way to absolutely fix it, is to disable padding removal and have enough tuners to support that (unless Sage can figure a way to get dshow to write to two files at once).

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by stanger89

I guess I've never understood what the fascination is with watching "live" TV through a PVR at all. It just seems to add unnecessary complexity. I know when I had cable, I just ran another line to the TV, and if I wanted to just "watch TV" I'd just fire up the TV and tune a channel.

I disagree with your notion that people might as well watch TV directly if they're watching it live. I don't watch "live" TV very much, but I do frequently catch up to currently recording TV shows. It's not a big deal, but sometimes the next week's preview is interrupted a bit from the gap. I don't have enough tuners to always do padding all the time, and I don't particularly care, but it's minor annoyance.

I also occasionally watch live TV mostly for background noise while I'm doing other things. If something particularly interesting comes on, it's nice to be able to rewind it. Or, if I watch sports I'm always watching it live. It's nice to be able to pause things briefly or rewind things to watch questionable calls, etc. And, sporting events frequently go over on time, and that gap tends to happen at inopportune times. If I have people over I'll set up a manual recording and pad it just in case, but it's sort of annoying to have to do that.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by reggie14

I disagree with your notion that people might as well watch TV directly if they're watching it live. I don't watch "live" TV very much, but I do frequently catch up to currently recording TV shows. It's not a big deal, but sometimes the next week's preview is interrupted a bit from the gap. I don't have enough tuners to always do padding all the time, and I don't particularly care, but it's minor annoyance.

I've done that too, I'll start a favorite or other recording before it's over. But that's not live,

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by stanger89

I've done that too, I'll start a favorite or other recording before it's over. But that's not live,

It's close enough. You get the same gap between episodes on the hour/half-hour if you don't stop watching TV after your show is over. I know I'm considering that "live TV" for the purposes of this discussion, and I'm guessing other people are too.

[Skirge01]

Originally Posted by MeInMaui

FYI

There may be some things that can be done to try to reduce the severity of the pause. Here are several properties you could try changing in your sage.properties file on your server that might help. (shut down sage first and backup up the original)

seeker/fast_mux_switch=true
videoframe/fast_file_switching=true
videoframe/safe_fast_file_switching=false
videoframe/local_encoding_to_playback_delay=0

Most of these I have set as you've described, but I don't see this one in the client or server properties file:

videoframe/fast_file_switching=true

Is it still a valid switch?

[Ryokurin]

Originally Posted by trini0

So not true. My whole network is synced to a few external ntp servers, and my time is fairly accurate. I still miss out during pauses, that I have to run to a tv network website to catch what I missed, (which I've done a few times for a good show), then for me, whats the true value of the pause.
Setting overlap wouldn't cure all situations (such back to back programs).


Regardless of what SageTV *allows* you to do, it doesn't *allow* for people like myself to *choose* whether or not they want the pause.

Me personally. I'm not asking for either pause or no pause. I respect that some like it the way it is.
I'm asking whether or not its possible to do both, and to let the end user decide what they want. A feature I would gladly pay for.

Just because your systems are on a official time does not mean that the stations is. For instance, I can always count on Spike TV to be at least 30 seconds off, and Discovery to be a few seconds off, while most of the networks are spot on. If you have scheduled recordings you just need to figure out which networks you need to extend the recording another minute on. there's not much that can be done otherwise.

As far as providing the two ways, there's probably reasons why they chose the way they did. For all we know it could be legal reasons, not technical.

[bastafidli]

I am not using SageTV at this time neither for LiveTV nor as my PVR exactly for a discussion like this.

The little time I have to sit down and watch the TV regardless if it is recorded or live I dont want to spend thinking about if the glitch that just occurred is a feature, bug, limitation, etc. I just want to have the best experience as possible during the time I have to spent on it. No skips, not pauses, see every second of the show I am currently watching uninterrupted without being rocket engineer to integrate various components to make it work and then even tweak cryptic configuration files to ensure that it actually works as it should (as described here). I do not want to listen to the family complaining about missing the end of the show or the beginning because of the bug/limitation/feature of the software.

So I use my settop box for watching live tv and sage for my recorded media (which works without tweaks out of the box) and even though I would love to get rid of the extra cabling and boxes in the media cabinent and some of the feature of sagetv are tempting, it is not worth the headaches and frustration with tv recording described in this and other discussions on this forum.

[49studebaker]

A possible solution would be to always have a small buffer between the tv card and the recording file on the hard drive. While Sage is opening one file and closing the previous file the buffer would retain the video data. No "pause" and the benefits of recording to a file are not lost. Only disadvantage is the recording on the hard drive is 10 seconds behind live tv but I do not think that would bother anyone.

video from tv card -> 10 second buffer in memory -> video file on hard drive

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by 3dOptics

A possible solution would be to always have a small buffer between the tv card and the recording file on the hard drive. While Sage is opening one file and closing the previous file the buffer would retain the video data. No "pause" and the benefits of recording to a file are not lost. Only disadvantage is the recording on the hard drive is 10 seconds behind live tv but I do not think that would bother anyone.

video from tv card -> 10 second buffer in memory -> video file on hard drive

This is what I always thought should be done!

For me the slight pause in playback wouldn't be so bad if I didn't miss anything. For me it's more a problem with recordings than with live tv. I frequently see situations where I have back to back favorites on the same channel and Sage removes the padding. Often the first show runs a little late or the second show starts a little early, so you need to watch both recordings to see one of the shows in its entirety. But, because of the pause, there are always a few seconds of the "split" recording that are missing. I know you could set Sage not to remove the padding, but then you are more likely to have recording conflicts.

One other related idea I had that would help tremendously is if Sage added an option to Only remove padding on Back to Back Favorites on the Same Channel IF IT WAS NEEDED to avoid a recording conflict. This would be better than the current "all or nothing" approach.

[sharker]

Originally Posted by 3dOptics

video from tv card -> 10 second buffer in memory -> video file on hard drive

This is what I thought should be done also. Wouldn't this also help in channel surfing, in that recordings under 10 seconds wouldn't even need to be saved to the harddrive? I actually thought this is what people were referring to as a circular buffer. I realize this could cause a problem in switching from one show to another, but this could also be a settable variable. If you want a 10 sec buffer, great! 1 sec, fine also.

I'm surprised no one mentioned watching the news "Live". This is a big point in our house in that most of the news stories are ignorable, but when an interesting piece comes on, we rewind and watch from the beginning - which is a very good reason to have a pvr in the first place.

[Taddeusz]

I just read this whole thread. I have to say that my fiance, now wife, tried for a couple weeks to watch live tv using SageTV and the whole experience was fraught with problems. Mostly caused by instabilities with the HDPVR but I'm sure the pause was one of her frustrations even if she never mentioned it. In the end she/we reverted to using the STB for watching live tv and SageTV for watching recordings. Obviously this is not ideal.

I think this last idea is probably a gem. Assuming there is enough RAM you wouldn't even need to use the hard drive for the buffer. Create a small 10 second buffer in RAM for each tuner and retire data to the hard drive as the buffer is cycling. Assuming you're recording from an HDPVR at the Best-H.264 quality setting that would equal about 17MB of RAM to buffer that much video. The only issue with this is that due to VM limitations in Windows SageTV is limited to 2GB of memory. The more tuners you have the less memory would be available to the program itself.

Depending on the situation this may or may not solve the problem of the pause but would certainly minimize it. If you're watching completely live you shouldn't see a pause between programs. However, if you've timeshifted at all past the 10sec buffer you will see a slight break between programs.

What this should do is, in the case of the HDPVR, prevent SageTV from needing to stop and start the recording incurring the standard 4sec break or in my case 7.5sec. All the while it is still able to maintain each discrete recording and the ability to set a live program to record and still keep everything up to when you began watching.

The capture graph would be attached to the circular RAM buffer and the buffer would be dumped to file as its data is retired. No need to destroy and create graphs between programs.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

Depending on the situation this may or may not solve the problem of the pause but would certainly minimize it. If you're watching completely live you shouldn't see a pause between programs. However, if you've timeshifted at all past the 10sec buffer you will see a slight break between programs.

What this should do is, in the case of the HDPVR, prevent SageTV from needing to stop and start the recording incurring the standard 4sec break or in my case 7.5sec. All the while it is still able to maintain each discrete recording and the ability to set a live program to record and still keep everything up to when you began watching.

The capture graph would be attached to the circular RAM buffer and the buffer would be dumped to file as its data is retired. No need to destroy and create graphs between programs.

Not exactly, you touch upon what I think is the entire issue. The way Sage is written (if not the way it has to be) is at the very least, the entire capture graph needs to be torn down and reconstructed to change from one file to the next. This, AFAIK, is the cause of the "pause". I don't believe Directshow lets you dynamically change filter connections while the graph is running. You have to stop the graph, pull off one dump filter and add a new one.

I don't know, maybe it's possible to write your own custom dump filter that can dynamically write to arbitrary (even multiple) files on the HDD, but that would still need logic to know how to chop the video on an I-frame.

[Taddeusz]

It would probably need to be some kind of custom thing. I know a bit about programming but I'm no programmer. To me in my little brain it sounds at least moderately plausible.