Stuttering/Macroblocking occurring with increased frequency

[scm]

I have started having increased problems with areas of recordings macroblocking, freezing up and breaking apart. Visually, it looks like when a weak digital signal is being recorded and it breaks up. However, I'm having this happen on stations that have excellent signal strength. The problem equally effects playback on two different HD200s, so I think it is a recording issue, not a playback issue. I am concerned this may be caused by my harddrives not being able to read/write fast enough to support everything happening. I'm hoping some Sage users with more computer savy than me can help me rule in or out some problems.

First, my server's specs:
Intel Core 2 processor with four gig ram running WinXP pro (XP only sees three gig of ram.)
Sage 6.6 running as service.
Two Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB 7200rpm SATA 6.0gb/s drives running in Raid 0 via Gigabyte GA-965P motherboard's onboard raid controller.

Recordings via two HDHR units (four tuners) recording over-the-air digital transmissions.

Commercial processing monitored with SJQ and processed via Show Analyzer running on separate networked computer.

Gigabit network managed with Netgear router, Intel NICs and HP Procurve switch.


It is possible with this setup to be at one time recording four show to harddrive, spinning two shows back to the network to be processed by ShowAnalyzer. This could result in six streams coming on and off the drives.

Questions:

• Is it possible that I have too much data being written to the harddrive with this setup? Solution would be to buy more drives and split the recording load.
• Is it likely that the onboard raid controller on the Gigabyte motherboard is just not handing the data well? Solution then would be to buy another raid controller or just revert to not using raid.
• Is it more likely that my HDHRs are going out on me? Solution would be to buy new HDHRs.

Any ideas on which problem (or another I've not tought of) could be causing this issue?

[scm]

Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

[SWKerr]

I would turn off ShowAnalyzer for a few days and see if it really makes any difference.

Also: Record some stuff at times when the tuners are not busy just to verify that it is not a problem with your signal. Are some stations better than others. There are problems related to something called Multi-path that can cause problems like you described even with good signal strength.

I have had four streams recording on lesser hardware without issues. The Black drives should be capable of keeping up unless something else is going on. I would think more likely a network or Mult-path issue.

[dcardellini]

I am experiencing the same problem, but with different hardware. In my case, though, I did make some changes to the system, and it is possible that I did something to cause this.

Since I made some changes on my system, I am suddenly seeing macroblocking on my OTA tuned recordings.

My tuners have not changed at at: Qty(4) HVR-950 USB OTA , and Qty(3) Firewire STB's for Cable channels. Everything worked flawlessly in my previous config.

I changed my motherboard/RAM, and I changed my antenna both at same time (same antenna amp though).

The antenna is a high gain model and I have tried attenuating signal (thinking it was too strong). I suspected maybe one bad USB tuner, but macroblocking appears on all of them, and not just limited to one or a couple of channels. Macroblocking is NOT happening thru the cable Firewire tuners though.

I do not see a correlation from making one recording, to having seven recordings at the same time, so I do not think it is a "pushing to disk" issue.

Have been living with this for about 8 months now.

Another data point: Recently several recordings on both OTA and cable/Firewire have been corrupted. They will play to a point, and then stop. I can stop the playback, no circle-of death. This will happen on my two big screen clients PC (they are same build), but recordings will play thru on my HD100, and play on MPC-HC on the same PC Clients.

Running Mpeg2Repair free utility flags a couple of errors in these files (however, it can't seem to fix them.)

Without this recent development (of corrupted recordings), I was starting to think that my new MB was slightly starving the (4) USB tuners for power, and I was preparing to isolate one tuner on a powered USB hub known for overdrive capability.

However, with this recent development of corrupted recordings, I am starting to suspect the RAM in this machine. My server, and two clients share the same MB/processor/RAM, and one of my clients just recently started to manifest weird problems all resolved by changing my Crucial Ballistix RAM out.

Edit:
Humm,....interesting post about Crucial RAM

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...36&postcount=3