Live tv playback freezes for a few seconds then fast forwards to catch up

[dinki]

I am posting this in this subforum as it appears to be an issue with Sagetv server and not a problem with my extender(s).

I've moved my Sagetv to a new server as my old server died. I've had an odd problem on both machines that I'm finally looking at fixing. I only use sage on my hd200 and mediamvp. The problem I have is similar on both.

On the hd200 when watching live tv I sometimes experience a pause in video/audio (like you pressed the pause button) and after five or six seconds, the video plays back in really fast motion until it catches up to where it should be. I've only noticed this happening on livetv.

On the mediamvp on both live tv and recorded programs, I experience a pause for a few seconds and then video begins again at the point where it left off. It's like someone pressed pause and then pressed play five or six seconds later. This happens almost every day. I think that it only happens once per day but I'm not sure.

What confuses me is that this is happening on two different servers. Could this be network related? How can I track down what is causing these pauses?

[dinki]

Apparently I posted in the wrong subforum. Has anyone experienced this behavior? Should I request official help?

[keepersg]

Originally Posted by dinki

Apparently I posted in the wrong subforum. Has anyone experienced this behavior? Should I request official help?

You are not alone. This happens to me sometimes. Isn't clear what causes it. My sage server is a whs and I use extenders. I've thought it's probably hard drive related when whs is busy drive balancing but really have no idea.

[dwk]

I've got the same issues, but figured it was something specific to my server such as anti-virus scans or maybe a network issue. However after hearing this, it'd probably be a good idea to open a support case to get the Sage guys to take a look at the logs.

[BobPhoenix]

I've seen this before but for me it was a hardware problem. I replaced my motherboard, CPU and memory and have not had the problem sense. Before I did this I could actually see the pauses while navigating on the windows desktop. So if you don't see any pauses there then yours probably isn't the same cause as mine. I've since determined it was the motherboard that was bad for me and I will be RMA'ing it later this week.

[starfire]

Originally Posted by dinki

I am posting this in this subforum as it appears to be an issue with Sagetv server and not a problem with my extender(s).

I've moved my Sagetv to a new server as my old server died. I've had an odd problem on both machines that I'm finally looking at fixing. I only use sage on my hd200 and mediamvp. The problem I have is similar on both.

On the hd200 when watching live tv I sometimes experience a pause in video/audio (like you pressed the pause button) and after five or six seconds, the video plays back in really fast motion until it catches up to where it should be. I've only noticed this happening on livetv.

On the mediamvp on both live tv and recorded programs, I experience a pause for a few seconds and then video begins again at the point where it left off. It's like someone pressed pause and then pressed play five or six seconds later. This happens almost every day. I think that it only happens once per day but I'm not sure.

What confuses me is that this is happening on two different servers. Could this be network related? How can I track down what is causing these pauses?

Yes I am getting the same, just run extenders with a WinXP server. Never had this issue with Sage 6, only 7.

I can get pauses maybe once a day, where it can pause from anywhere from 10 seconds to over 1 minute then it catches up in fast forward. Recently it has paused when just navigating menus, not just video playback.

I can logon to my server at this time and it appears to be running fine, I can find no issues - also have debugging enabled and the only thing that stands out is that typically there are no messages output by Sage (which is unusual) while the extender is hung.

I've ran tests on all my hard drives but they come back clean.

Unsure where the problem lies currently

[Taddeusz]

I have this happen, along with other SageTV response issues all the time. It has to do with Java garbage collection. Once GC starts it essentially halts everything. I went through a bug report session with SageTV and they think it had to do with RAM, or rather lack thereof. I will admit that my commit charge in Windows is actually very close to the available physical RAM. RAM is on my future upgrade plan but a new 2TB hard drive is a little more crucial at the moment. Maybe in a month I can upgrade to 4GB.

[Torkild]

It happens to me all so.
one or two times a day and gives me an pause of 3-4sec.

[fidget]

It may be related to the Java heap. I installed the Java Heap Plugin into Sage V7 and found that my pauses were related to times when the heap was full and Java had to stop everything so it could to garbage collection. Upping my heap to 1024 MB solved the problems, although 512 MB didn't seem to do the trick.

[MrD]

Are you using HD-PVRs? I attribute this problem to my PVR.

[trk2]

I too have had this problem. It seems to be related to a hard drive spinning up on your Sage server. Obviously it's not the hard drive that is currently being used for live tv recording. I have drastically cut down on the pause occurrences by disabling the automated imported media scanning (default of every 1 hour). However there are many reasons why a computer can tell a hard drive to spin up outside of sage. The true fix would be to keep all drives spinning only while the HDX00 is in use, perhaps setting the media scanning to a time (every 10 minutes?) that would prevent any hard drives from sleeping would do the trick.

[Michelo]

I have the exact same problem. It is becoming very annoying. It started after the last STV update to 7.0.23.2.

It happens when playing Live TV, Recorded TV, Watching Movies. I played with the heapsize setting. But with no results. Installed new version of Java etc.

The CPU en mem usage is low and stable when it happens.

Using SageTV 7.0.23 for WHS with two HD-300 extenders.

[dstanley]

I am having these issues as well with my WHS system. I never thought of the STV update - I have been tearing my hair out - changing java heap - removing plugins, etc, and nothing is helping ...
Is there a way to 'uninstall' an STV update?
Maybe that would fix this problem ... worth a try ...

[dinki]

For what it's worth, I'm using an older version (not sure which) of the STV so I don't know that it is STV related. I also get the problem using SageMC on my MediaMVP.

[JohanDW]

Happens to me as well, a few times per week. I am using v7.0.23, but I am sure I have seen it happening already some STV versions ago.

I have an HD200 and an HD300, if the situation occurs it happens on both the HDx00 simultaneously. I checked the load of the server at that time and indeed you cannot see anything obvious. Server seems to be responding normally.

I have never seen this happen on a SageTV PC client however, but since I don't use that continuously I cannot draw any conclusions.

I have increased my Java heap size to 1024 Mbyte, but it still happens occasionally.

Thought it was PC/Windows install related, but now I am not convinced anymore since a lot of people are having this problem.

Would be nice to know how to collect useful information. How can we see whether the garbage collection is active, or when the disks start spinning??

[wrems]

I've been experiencing this more frequently. I have changed out my hardware since and the problem persists. New mobo, cpu and complete fresh install. I think my problem is with my recording drive. I've removed the suspect drive from the recording paths, and have the recordings going to a new hdd. I've left the recordings on the suspect one for the time being while I see if my problem clears up. So far I haven't noticed these issues, but its only been 12 hours. I should know more by the end of the week and as I watch more programming off the new hdd.

The suspect drive is a Seagate 1.5TB just for the record... SeaTools doesn't turn up anything for this drive...

[gambitpvr]

I had the same pause problem when i built my Sage 7 server, but only for movies that I had ripped. I have my Movie collection on my WHS machine and my shows are recorded to local drives. I usually watch via a HD300 or a client machine.

I did a few things to fix the issue:

- Turned off auto rescan of media library
- Set static IP on my WHS
- Set static IP on my Sage server

Not sure which actually fixed the issue or if it was a combo of all of them. I noticed on my WHS that the logs showed a DHCP request failure when the pauses would happen. It could be a bug in my Netgear router..it's been acting odd lately but I haven't had a chance to replace it yet.

My movie playback has been smooth since I made these changes so, they did fix the problem for me.

[dinki]

This problem is really getting to me so I sent a reply to support. This is what I received back in regards to my question:

This is some kind of network or disk I/O delay. If you are using mapped
drives or UNC paths; then it's most likely a network delay....otherwise it's
a hard disk delay. Both are usually indicative of some kind of underlying
problem in the network or disk.

Thanks,

George Oms
SageTV, LLC

I have replied that I do not have any UNC or network drives but I am still waiting for a reply. There seems to be a considerable lag time between emails.

Can anyone offer suggestions on finding what might be causing my problem? I looked at my logs and noticed that I had some lines that said:

Sat 2/5 23:06:01.991 [Ministry@33aa7b] Ministry is waiting for 180 sec

I'm not sure if this is even relavant as I see these lines frequently. The thing that brought this to my attention is that I had the pause/ff behavior on the top of the hour three hours in a row. I noticed that one of the lines stated that Ministry is waiting for 3600 sec (one hour) and then I saw the pause/ff again at the top of the following hour.

[trk2]

I'll post my solution again (with more line breaks to catch people's attention), maybe some others will try and confirm if this works?

Problem: Sage playback pausing and then fast-forwarding

Cause: (Hypothesis) Caused by spin-up delay of sleeping hard drive. Obviously this only affects people who have multiple hard drives in their system, mapped network drives that may be sleeping, or leave cd/dvd media in the drive.

Action 1: Turned off power savings to hard drive
Result 1: No pauses

Action 2: Turned off scan of media library (hard drives allowed to sleep)
Result 2: No Pauses

Action 3: Turned back on hard drive sleeping and media scan
Result 3: Pauses

The cause and solution seems pretty clear at least in my particular case. Remember that there are other actions that can cause a sleeping drive to wake (virus scanners, disk defragmentors, search indexing etc...) so just turning off scan of media library will not guarantee pause free viewing. My current solution is to set the media scan value to a time less the hard drive sleep timer on your power settings and make sure you are scanning import folders from all hard drives, even if you have no media on a drive. This will keep all drives spinning when using the extender but allow them to sleep when the extender is inactive.

[dinki]

Thanks for the tips. I did turn the scan media off but did not try turning power saving off. I did, however, remove a usb hard drive from my import list. I'm not sure if that will help as I set the scan media to off.

This leaves me with the OS hard drive and my sagetv recording drive. I know the sagetv recording drive is not sleeping as it is being written/read to when the problem happens. I'm also assuming that the OS hard drive is being read/written to periodically as well but this may not be true. I prefer not to turn off power savings but I may have no choice.