Colossus recording in slow motion

[sleonard]

It was more a report of my observation than hypothesis since I didn't actually hypothesize much of anything. Just a bad word choice there. Nevertheless, I saw what I saw and my Colossus recordings have the 'glitches' in them regardless of what is used to play them and they coincide perfectly in time with the recording errors in System Messages.

RAM usage stayed pretty constant until a glitch and after Sage and the Colossus recovered RAM usage had noticably risen. When I was able to watch a more serious 'glitch' where the live recording just froze for a fairly long period, Task Manager showed the RAM Usage climbing. The moment that the HD300 turned itself off canceling the live recording the RAM usage stopped climbing and then stayed constant at the new higher level.

Narflex's suggestion that the root cause of these 'glitches' is the Hauppauge drivers is consistant with the above observations but it also appears that Sage may not be handling the errors well resulting in the RAM usage not returning to normal after Sage resets the Colossus and recording continues.

S

[sleonard]

Just finished a new install on a new SSD drive. Win7x32 + Sage 7.1.5. Took almost 8 hours but all the hard parts are done. I am not going to install any plugins at all and keep monitoring the Colossus as well as the HD-PVR's for at least a week. Any recording glitches will extend that time. I want this system squeaky clean for troubleshooting.

S

[sleonard]

So far, so good. It's still too early to come to any conclusions but not a single 'glitch' since the re-install on Win7. The SO will be watching live tv all week so this will get put to the test.

S

[metzz71]

TVMaster... I changed the setting in the sage.properties file "mmc/set_crossbar_redundantly=true" which is now part of .14 and later beta's. I also increased the delay_to_wait_after_tuning=2000 from 0. This solved my problems with initial tuning where the video/audio is choppy. The only problem I have now is after time audio delays in live tv. have not spent much time on it. Waiting for driver upgrade.

[metzz71]

leonard, did your reinstall fix the audio sync issues over time?

[sleonard]

I can't say that I've experienced any strictly audio sync issues with the Colossus. What I saw and what my SO seems to describe fits the choppy, stuttering video issues closer.

I should also say that memory usage of SageTVService.exe is also back to normal. About 350-400 MB with no extenders running and about 400-500 MB with extenders being used for either live or recorded TV. When the extenders are turned off the memory usage drops back to original levels. Unlike what I was experiencing on XP where it went up and up but never returned to nomal.

S

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by metzz71

TVMaster... I changed the setting in the sage.properties file "mmc/set_crossbar_redundantly=true" which is now part of .14 and later beta's. I also increased the delay_to_wait_after_tuning=2000 from 0. This solved my problems with initial tuning where the video/audio is choppy. The only problem I have now is after time audio delays in live tv. have not spent much time on it. Waiting for driver upgrade.

thanks - I've tried everything, reloaded everything, but still, if Colossus is source being viewed or recorded, and the HD-PVR starts a recording, HD-PVR is killing the audio of Colossus, live OR recorded.
I am amazed I seem to be the only person with two tuners who has this problem.
Thanks for the tuning tip. I've noticed audio/video VERY choppy when tuning to a channel for the first time, to which it EVENTUALLY settles down. Bummer. I have more than enough ram and horsepower.

[sleonard]

There was one bad recording today. It is a 30 minute episode of "How I Met Your Mother" that my SO watched live. Luckily she saved it for me to look at. When I try to watch it in Sage the audio and video is smooth but the timeline moves forward in 10-11 second increments every real second. After 2-3 minutes, the timeline reaches 30 minutes and Sage thinks the show is at the end. Windows shows the file as 2.63 GB in size, 2 minutes 50 seconds in length and 136,645 kbps for the bitrate.

This would seem to be an issue with the Hauppauge drivers messing up the timestamps.

S

[metzz71]

I had tv on in the background most of today (MLB NETWORK now available on u-verse!!!) and I noticed that audio sync was an issue within about 30 minutes or less. I have serious sync issues it appears. COME ON UPDATE!

[SHS]

Narflex's suggestion that the root cause of these 'glitches' is the Hauppauge drivers is consistant with the above observations but it also appears that Sage may not be handling the errors well resulting in the RAM usage not returning to normal after Sage resets the Colossus and recording continues

I belive sleonard you on something there I to belive the root cause of these 'glitches' are more with in SageTV and not so much the Hauppauge drivers as I was thinking at the time before becuases about 12:30AM 3/15/2011 the glitches start actting up in two late nigth show on me and this moning as I trying to watch them dam it I forgot enable logging ops.
Any way I check my SageTV Server and memory usage was around 750/800 and try watch LiveTV and problem was still there so I put SageTV to sleep and Start up Showbiz and it was play rigth no prblem there with SageTV still running in background so exit Showbiz and try agine in SageTV and it was still there so restart SageTV the and problem was gone.

[sleonard]

Originally Posted by SHS

I belive sleonard you on something there I to belive the root cause of these 'glitches' are more with in SageTV and not so much the Hauppauge drivers as I was thinking at the time before becuases about 12:30AM 3/15/2011 the glitches start actting up in two late nigth show on me and this moning as I trying to watch them dam it I forgot enable logging ops.
Any way I check my SageTV Server and memory usage was around 750/800 and try watch LiveTV and problem was still there so I put SageTV to sleep and Start up Showbiz and it was play rigth no prblem there with SageTV still running in background so exit Showbiz and try agine in SageTV and it was still there so restart SageTV the and problem was gone.

What OS are you running? The memory usage I observed was on XP Pro but since doing a fresh install of Win7 Pro on a new drive those issues seem to have gone away. (I had one bad live recording yesterday but that one seems to have been the drivers screwing up the timestamps) It could also be that Win7 just has better memory management, that the Hauppauge drivers were developed for Win7 and adapted to XP, or simply that I had a bunch of crap bogging down the XP/Sage install.

S

[SHS]

Windows 7 64bit os

[sleonard]

Well, then. Maybe I am on to something. Unfortunately, I'm not about to put that old drive back in so further troubleshooting is limited to the new install that appears to be working OK. <knock on wood with crossed fingers>

S

[SHS]

Originally Posted by sleonard

Well, then. Maybe I am on to something. Unfortunately, I'm not about to put that old drive back in so further troubleshooting is limited to the new install that appears to be working OK. <knock on wood with crossed fingers>

S

You doing Task Scheduler auto backup or restart ever nigth?

[sleonard]

I do have a task to back up the wiz.bin every night and when I had the XP/Colossus combo I had to do a reboot every night as well. With Win7 I'm leaving it on 24/7 and memory usage is fine so far.

S

[sleonard]

Well, just had this issue happen again except this time it was on one of the HD-PVR's. The Colossus was already recording a favorite and a live recording was started from the Program Guide. The recording light/bling light kept going on and off, the playback would freeze, stutter, then go in fast motion to catch up. Stopping and restarting the live airing had no effect, resetting the HD-PVR had no effect, the scheduled recording on the Colossus played back OK. The Sage UI itself started to become slow and unresponsive and I had to go to the server and restart the Sage service. After that all was well again.

I did forget to increase the Java Heap after the fresh install so the memory usage I said was normal may in fact be high enough to be maxing out. Does the service use the Java virtual machine if the server UI is not being used? What is the default JVMMaxHeapSizeMB?

S

[phareous]

New drivers available now:
http://www.hauppauge.com/site/suppor..._colossus.html

[Rico66]

I installed the new driver yesterday, but didn't see any difference. SD recordings are still subject to heavy stuttering, whereas HD recordings are better.
I did a bit of channel surfing and after a time the whole system would become sluggish. It started with video playback (1080i), but even mouse movements were in slow motion. I closed the client, which stopped the video playback, but this didn't help. Then I managed to stop and restart the Sage service (kind of tough if your mouse reacts slowly...), and this actually fixed the issue.
Yes this might still be related to the driver, but something doesn't look right on the Sage side here, if the service itself causes such problems (even if triggered by driver issues)

[tvmaster2]

well, the driver update didn't cure my problem: When a HD-PVR recording starts, it kills the audio on a Colossus recording in-progress. Guess they haven't tested their products with THEIR products yet.
Why do I get the feeling we're in for another long, HD-PVR testing-style burn-in period . . .

[sleonard]

This continues to happen. It takes most of the day to start and Task Manager shows SageTVService.exe memory usage slowly but continuously growing. Once it starts getting close to what the JVMHeap is set to (768MB) live TV starts to get choppy and stutter. A net stop/ net start on Sage resolves the issue for another day.

Time to submit a bug report.

S