The Official "Working SageTV + Ceton Firmware + SageDCT Version Combinations" thread

[gcomrie]

Originally Posted by AlphaCrew

I just don't understand why this is happening.. It didn't start until I upgraded, and I have made no changes to my system. I have to believe that it has to do with SageDCT 1.9 in some way, shape or form...

AlphaCrew,

I had the same problem. You need to make sure that you selet "Static Tuners:" on the "Settings" tab and click "Save".

Next, you need to go to the "Tuners" tab, select the first tuner in the list, click "Enabled" and set "Port:" to the port that is listed in your "Sage.properties" file for that tuner. Then click the "Save" button directly to the right.

Repeat these steps for each tuner and you should be good (at least, that's what worked for me).

-Gordon

[gcomrie]

BTW, I also upgraded from 1.4 to 1.9.

-Gordon

[sundansx]

Hey, anyone on this thread using their cable card tuner with Frontier FIOS tv service (I am in the Beaverton OR area)? I called them today and they said that they do not offer "HD cablecards", only "SD cablecards". Is there a difference? They seemed to think that they have never offered a HD cablecard.
Anyone with success? did they just send you a "SD cablecard" and you are able to get HD on your cablecard tuner?
thanks.

[babgvant]

Originally Posted by sundansx

Hey, anyone on this thread using their cable card tuner with Frontier FIOS tv service (I am in the Beaverton OR area)? I called them today and they said that they do not offer "HD cablecards", only "SD cablecards". Is there a difference? They seemed to think that they have never offered a HD cablecard.
Anyone with success? did they just send you a "SD cablecard" and you are able to get HD on your cablecard tuner?
thanks.

There is no such thing as an SD or HD cable card. They have to offer a multi-stream cable card per FCC regs.

[The Truth]

Originally Posted by babgvant

There is no such thing as an SD or HD cable card. They have to offer a multi-stream cable card per FCC regs.

This is correct. There is no such thing as an HD cable card or a SD cable card. Only multi and single stream cards. But most likely they will not kno what that is either, but the card you need should say Multi on the top of it.

[The Truth]

Just an FYI for everyone, I am running driver package 1.3.02-20110901 and FW 1.0.9.5, HW 4884.

Everything seems to be working nicely. I would like to add a heat sync and fan to the card though just for the hell of it.


For some reason though my card won't sync up with FIOS on a restart so I have to Fully power down the PC, which could be a huge Pain In the A if I wasn't on location, so I have my router do an Automatic WOL every minute. So I can just shut down the PC remotely if there is every an issue. Also if there is a power outage, it will tuen back on automatically of course.

[King of Bayonne]

Andy, can you spend a few lines and clarify what exactly some of the parameters in SageDCT do? Specifically, the various tuneables that appear on the Settings tab of the SageDCT Config tool in SageDCT 2.1.8.

I am debugging a couple of tough-to-reproduce problems and it would be helpful to understand what these values do, what effect changing them would have, how they might be related to or interact with things in the Sage.properties file, etc.

I appreciate your efforts -- Thanks!


KoB

[AlphaCrew]

Originally Posted by The Truth

Just an FYI for everyone, I am running driver package 1.3.02-20110901 and FW 1.0.9.5, HW 4884.

Everything seems to be working nicely. I would like to add a heat sync and fan to the card though just for the hell of it.


For some reason though my card won't sync up with FIOS on a restart so I have to Fully power down the PC, which could be a huge Pain In the A if I wasn't on location, so I have my router do an Automatic WOL every minute. So I can just shut down the PC remotely if there is every an issue. Also if there is a power outage, it will tuen back on automatically of course.

I've had to turn off PBDA, as for some unknown reason, on my system, SageDCT just starts consuming massive amounts of CPU cycles (60%), even when no recording is active or has been active..

It's the strangest thing...

EDIT:
I should mention, with PBDA off, the latest version of SageDCT is working very good..

[babgvant]

Originally Posted by King of Bayonne

Andy, can you spend a few lines and clarify what exactly some of the parameters in SageDCT do? Specifically, the various tuneables that appear on the Settings tab of the SageDCT Config tool in SageDCT 2.1.8.

The settings should have tool tips that explain what they do in general terms. If you have a specific question LMK.

[King of Bayonne]

Originally Posted by babgvant

The settings should have tool tips that explain what they do in general terms. If you have a specific question LMK.

Write Buffer: I certainly know what write buffers are. But under what circumstances/errors, if any, would you recommend raising this value?

RTP Buffer: Ditto.

Auto reset wait: I understand this is a delay value in seconds.. but under what circumstances/errors do you decide to reset?

RTP Delay: Under what circumstances would a non-zero value be used here?

Tuner Reset Count: What exactly constitutes a "failed tune"?

Delay Tuner Start: When does this value actually come into play? Is it at boot time? First tune? Every tune?


In addition to being just generally curious about these, I am trying to debug an odd situation where my Ceton will occasionally not record some channels ("Halt Detected In Recording") that record fine most of the time and pass diagnostics. I just want to ensure that there aren't times when the tuner is ready and signal is good, but Sage "thinks" the tuner is not ready and therefore the recording fails...

Thanks!


KoB

[babgvant]

Originally Posted by King of Bayonne

Write Buffer: I certainly know what write buffers are. But under what circumstances/errors, if any, would you recommend raising this value?

This is the value passed to the object used to write the data received. A small value means that you have a lot of writes and it uses less RAM, a big number is the opposite. The default should work for most scenarios, but if you're writing across the network or the hard drive is slow it might be worth bumping up at the risk that SageTV will think the recording has halted because it doesn't see the file growing.

Originally Posted by King of Bayonne

RTP Buffer: Ditto.

Pretty much the same thing as above (cost/benefit) just at a different layer in the app.

Originally Posted by King of Bayonne

Auto reset wait: I understand this is a delay value in seconds.. but under what circumstances/errors do you decide to reset?

I don't recommend using this feature because it just hides problems.

Originally Posted by King of Bayonne

RTP Delay: Under what circumstances would a non-zero value be used here?

If you're using a Ceton tuner, never. If you're using a PRIME the default should work, but they seem to be VERY sensitive to the RTP setup procedure so it you see successful tunes but no data is received this will slow down the RTP session setup process.

Originally Posted by King of Bayonne

Tuner Reset Count: What exactly constitutes a "failed tune"?

The file size doesn't grow.

Originally Posted by King of Bayonne

Delay Tuner Start: When does this value actually come into play? Is it at boot time? First tune? Every tune?

Delays the startup process for the individual network encoders to give the DCT more time to wakeup/initialize after a reboot.

[Naylia]

I have a Ceton, on Windows 7, latest firmware (1.0.9.5 i think), and was running SageDCT 1.9. I had occassional Halt Detected that would go red and I'd get a recording of black screen for 60 minutes.

I upgraded to the latest version of SageDCT. Is PBDA the recommended method now? Or is sticking with the old way fine? Any thoughts?

[babgvant]

Originally Posted by Naylia

Is PBDA the recommended method now? Or is sticking with the old way fine? Any thoughts?

No, yes, yes

[Naylia]

Originally Posted by babgvant

yes

Hopefully they are good ones

Thanks!

[jarredduq]

I'm using version 2.1.8 of SageDCT over SageTV 7.1.9

Ceton USB infiniTV
FW: 1.0.9.6
Driver: 1.0.4.1
32-Bit Windows 7 Ultimate SP1

It has been working great for over a week....

BTW, I'm also running an original Silicon Dust HDHR and a Hauppauge HD-PVR (For premium channels that are Copy Never)

[egeller]

In the last week I have installed the Ceton 4-tuner USB box using a Comcast cable system as input. I followed Ceton's instructions on the installation and it went better than I expected. There is one behavior of SageDCT that I cannot figure out how to change.

Over the course of a few hours of running memory used by SageDCT grows and grows until SageTV bogs down and the recording streams start showing gaps and errors. CPU % also grows. The errors I see, in SageDCT's log, are "GetSize has not changed", "RTP Sequence Error" and "ProcessPackets: No data recieved."

I use Microsoft's Process Explorer instead of Task Manager, as it give better details. Process Explorer reports that the Working Set of Memory usage at SageDCT's service restart is < 64 MB. Over the course of a number of hours I see growing beyond 3 GB and the Sage UI gets sluggish. I begin to see errors in Ceton recordings when memory usage gets to the 3 GB level. I also see CPU % used grow as the amount of memory increases. Stopping and restarting the SageDCT service cures the symptoms. On occasion SageDCT will generate a message "DeviceRemoved" and it seems to clear up the problem on its own.

I am using version 2.1.8 of SageDCT. Just now I changed the reset tuner from 2 to 1, to see if that would improve things.

Did I miss something in the instructions on installing SageDCT? I don't see anybody else recently reporting the issues I am seeing. Does anybody have any ideas on what I should look at?

I have searched all the posts I can find here on this forum. I saw that the NIC settings may be part of the issue. However, comparing my setup to the comments nothing jumped out at me.

I am hoping I can get this problem resolved, so I can raise the tuner priorities on the Ceton tuners to be the highest. Right now I cannot do that.

[AlphaCrew]

Originally Posted by egeller

In the last week I have installed the Ceton 4-tuner USB box using a Comcast cable system as input. I followed Ceton's instructions on the installation and it went better than I expected. There is one behavior of SageDCT that I cannot figure out how to change.

Over the course of a few hours of running memory used by SageDCT grows and grows until SageTV bogs down and the recording streams start showing gaps and errors. CPU % also grows. The errors I see, in SageDCT's log, are "GetSize has not changed", "RTP Sequence Error" and "ProcessPackets: No data recieved."

I use Microsoft's Process Explorer instead of Task Manager, as it give better details. Process Explorer reports that the Working Set of Memory usage at SageDCT's service restart is < 64 MB. Over the course of a number of hours I see growing beyond 3 GB and the Sage UI gets sluggish. I begin to see errors in Ceton recordings when memory usage gets to the 3 GB level. I also see CPU % used grow as the amount of memory increases. Stopping and restarting the SageDCT service cures the symptoms. On occasion SageDCT will generate a message "DeviceRemoved" and it seems to clear up the problem on its own.

I am using version 2.1.8 of SageDCT. Just now I changed the reset tuner from 2 to 1, to see if that would improve things.

Did I miss something in the instructions on installing SageDCT? I don't see anybody else recently reporting the issues I am seeing. Does anybody have any ideas on what I should look at?

I have searched all the posts I can find here on this forum. I saw that the NIC settings may be part of the issue. However, comparing my setup to the comments nothing jumped out at me.

I am hoping I can get this problem resolved, so I can raise the tuner priorities on the Ceton tuners to be the highest. Right now I cannot do that.

I had a very similar problem ( http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...&postcount=515 )

I can't use PBDA with my system

[egeller]

Originally Posted by AlphaCrew

I had a very similar problem ( http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...&postcount=515 )

I can't use PBDA with my system

Thanks for the reply. I tried PBDA a couple of days ago and it did not work at all. I'm not using it.

I did try the powercfg command mentioned in the other thread. I am not sure what it told me.

[egeller]

I did some more digging. I verified that my .NET is OK on the PC. I also learned that .NET 2.0 SP2 is part of the Win 7 build. Also, apparently I am seeing evidence of a memory leak in SageDCT.

Process Explorer reports Gen 2 heap size is what is growing. A comment at CodeBetter.com says it indicates a memory leak. (Google net gen 2 heap size for more information)

I checked the SageDCT web site and I could not see that I could download an earlier version than 2.1.8 from there. I was thinking of trying an earlier version (2.1 or 2.0 perhaps) to see if I saw the same thing.

For now, I have a scheduled task (or whatever they call them in Win 7) set to run a script that restarts the SageDCT service every 2 hours. I hope I don't have to live with this forever.

[babgvant]

Originally Posted by egeller

I did some more digging. I verified that my .NET is OK on the PC. I also learned that .NET 2.0 SP2 is part of the Win 7 build. Also, apparently I am seeing evidence of a memory leak in SageDCT.

Process Explorer reports Gen 2 heap size is what is growing. A comment at CodeBetter.com says it indicates a memory leak. (Google net gen 2 heap size for more information)

Allocating and not immediately releasing memory isn't necessarily indicative of a memory leak. It's very difficult to have a true memory leak in managed code. That said, SageDCT does use native COM objects, so it's possible but if it were I would expect to be able to reproduce it locally.

The most likely scenario is that your target drive can't keep up with the inflow of RTP data so it is buffered in the receive and write components until it overflows; causing packet loss and the other symptoms that you're seeing.

Try 2.1.9 with "Write Async" enabled. It might help in this scenario.