Live TV pictures freezes and speeds up to catch up!

[heffneil]

I have had several incidents lately where sagetv will freeze up and then after about 15 to maybe 45 seconds (these are all approximates) the picture will speed up as if I was fast forward until it reaches the live broadcast. I am doing nothing and it doesn't look like this is happening on the hour or half hours (time after a show where comskip might run). Any thoughts?

This when only one extender is currently watching live tv on this tuner. The tuner is a avermedia 188c PCIE card.

Thanks!

Neil

[davenlr]

Mine did that as well, until I replaced a 500GB C drive with a 2TB C drive, and upgraded it from Win7 32bit to Win7 64 bit. Dont know which change fixed it.

[tmiranda]

I see this once in a while as well. For me skipping back 30 seconds fixes the issue. I can live with watching 30 seconds behind real-time

[patja]

I've been battling this pesky issue for months.

I don't think it has to do with the tuner but can't be sure. I don't watch any "live" TV (a misnomer for any Sage viewing experience, it is never really live). It can happen with OTA mpeg2 recordings or DirecTV h264 recordings from the Colossus tuner. I don't think it is a tuner problem because there seems to be nothing wrong with the recordings, and the problem is not reproducible: you can't stop and play the same recording and see the problem happen at the same point. I only run extenders: 2 HD200's and one HD300.

My best guess is it is a disk or network problem. I've tried running different perfmon counters to get some insight into what is going on and what the root cause might be, but haven't made any conclusions or fixed anything based on this yet. I've bumped my JVM heap up to the max, installed an Intel PCIe NIC, swapped network cables, made sure network connections are through the same bridge.

[sacrament055]

Maybe its just me but ive noticed in my case it seems to coincide with theend of aprogram transitioning to a new one

[MattHelm]

Originally Posted by patja

... "live" TV (a misnomer for any Sage viewing experience, it is never really live...

This is true of almost all TV, anyway. Live at your house, but even live TV is delayed (I think it's now 15 seconds?).

[dinki]

I've had this problem before and found that my recordings drive was heavily fragmented. A defrag cleared up the problem. Can't say that it'll work for you but it works for me.

[icmoney]

I too fought with this problem off and on over several months. I finally found the problem to be a cheap Roswell 1 Gigabyte switch in my home network. It was not even on the same spoke of my network as my HD300 and Server.

I am using a Netgear WNDR3700 Router connected via Cat5 cable to a Netgear switch in Home Theater room. Once I replaced the Roswell switch in my office with a Netgear 1 Gigabyte switch(same model as other one), all my problems disappeared.

Hope this info is helpful to some of you.

[nippe]

I had this problem as well before and I thought it was that my server ran out of juice. I started to monitor the CPU, saw that it wasn't related to the freezes.
After that I started to watch the network HW, no problem with HW but I saw that network traffic did die from the server when the freezes occurred. I started to investigate and I saw that a faulty configuration in my DHCP-server was the root-cause. I had by mistake set a static address in the dynamic domain. This caused a lot of unnecessary IP-renew's. When I solved that, problem's disappear.

[heffneil]

It very well could be a network issue. I need to evaluate what I have going on there. I have a couple HP switches in place which I Have been a big fan of in the past and they seem to have good architecture and reliability.

I am not using DHCP so I think that rules out that problem.

I did notice that video was garbled so I think my HD300 that I normally watch is on its way out. On top of it I believe my receiver which is brand new is having an issue because only certain audio streams from the HD300 work and others do not. I confirmed it is the receiver by switching to my directv box which too has no sound If I pull the plug on my receiver it seems to correct the issue....

[patja]

My latest attempt at solving the problem through trial and error guesswork was to change my configuration to use my OpenSolaris/Napp-It ZFS storage server for Recorded TV rather than the local drives on the Sage server I had been using.

I have yet to see the problem since making that change (knock on wood).

[jarredduq]

I fixed it by going to an older version of Java. I'm on version 6 update 25. Please be aware that running an older version of Java exposes you to security risks. Since my machine is dedicated to Sage, I don't really use the machine for other tasks, so the security risk is minimal.

I have tried almost every release of the version 6 java, and have settled on this one, as I no longer have any freezing of my video.

[patja]

Originally Posted by jarredduq

I fixed it by going to an older version of Java. I'm on version 6 update 25. Please be aware that running an older version of Java exposes you to security risks. Since my machine is dedicated to Sage, I don't really use the machine for other tasks, so the security risk is minimal.

I have tried almost every release of the version 6 java, and have settled on this one, as I no longer have any freezing of my video.

I am curious about this and the impact the Java version running on the server might have on the extender experience. Once playback has begun, does the extender interact directly with the recorded TV file (mpg, ts) over the network, or is the Sage server (and its installed version of Java) still engaged enough in the playback process to potentially be a culprit for playback issues?

With these playback issues (freeze then really fast catchup) the problem never seems to be with the file, which is why I was looking at lower level areas such as disk and network.

[heffneil]

We never got the answer to that question about the interaction with the file but I believe it is processed. If you view a movie from a third server it is streamed from the third server to the sage server to the extender / client.

Not sure if this helps but I still frequently have this issue

Edit: I update java all the time when it alerts me of an update. So I don't know the version off hand but it is latest.

Neil

[robogeek]

What's your Java Heap Size set at? Have you tried increasing the JVM Heap Size setting for SageTV in the Windows Registry? If you've done all you can to rule out likely culprits (hard drive, hard drive controller, network, driver updates, Windows updates, Windows) then I'd try increasing the JVM Heap Size setting. I find the Java garbage collection routines tend to cause the behavior you describe and increasing the JVM Heap Size will reduce how often the garbage collection needs to run.

[heffneil]

How do I determine this but I believe my heap is set at 1024 megs.

Thanks,

Neil

[robogeek]

If you are running SageTV Service, the best place to get the JVM heap size and memory usage is from one of your extenders or a placeshifter client. Go to the Setup->System Information menu option. Page down until you find the JVM Heap Size line (probably 1-3 pages down depending on how many tuners you have)...it will be just above the System Configuration Details section. It will give you three numbers, Used, Total, and Max. Max will be the actual JVM Heap Size setting in your Windows Registry. If the Total number is equal to or very near the Max number, then SageTV is maxing out the JVM memory at some point (not always a bad thing). The Used number will tell you how much of the JVM memory is currently being use. I wouldn't worry too much if the Total number is at or near the Max number if you have any Phoenix or fan art related plugins installed...they tend to gobble up memory, that's just the nature of the beast. If the Used number is at or near the Max number, then you either need to increase the JVM Heap Size or if the Max number is already set higher than 768 there is possibly a bad plugin causing a memory leak somewhere or there are just too many extenders/placeshifters running with too many plugins.

Just for clarity...On my server, my JVM Heap Size is set at 1297 and after less than two days, my Total number is over 1280, but the current Used number is sitting around 600 with only two MVP extender clients running since the last SageTV Service restart 37 hours ago.

[heffneil]

346 532 1038 are my three numbers currently. Interestingly enough we are watching a movie and it stopped when I was trying to get this information! Crappy.

Edit: I was getting the data from the client on the server fyi.

[robogeek]

If running SageTV Service, the client on the server machine may not give you true numbers for the Used and Total numbers. I don't use client on the server machine, but it may only report the Used and Total numbers assigned to the SageTV Client JVM and not the SageTV Service JVM that controls the extenders. I would say that with your JVM Heap Size already set that high, you're probably all set there. If you have SageTV debug logging enabled, you can scan through the log and do a search for memstats to see if the timestamp in the log for those memstats lines shows high memory usage during times of video pauses. If it is maxing out, the only options are increasing the JVM Heap Size even more, reducing the number of plugins installed, or restarting SageTV daily or every other day.

[heffneil]

Thanks for the idea! I am running Diamond and Phoenix and a few more plug ins so Im sure something isn't helping. I just checked on an HD300 and the numbers are

496/1038/1038 so what does that mean that the total is the same as the max?

Thanks,

Neil