Pauses On Playback?

[PeteCress]

My instance of SageTV has started pausing on playback. People's speech just stops for a fraction of a second and then resumes. Seems to come in fits.

I'm also getting episodes of pixellation/breakup on various channels.

My assumption is that the two problems are unrelated bc if I rewind 10 seconds upon hearing a pause, it always plays back just fine the second time while the pixellation episodes remain.

Does my assumption sound good?

If so, causes? Something around disc access would be my first guess. This never, ever happens when watching ripped movies, which reside on a NAS box.

RecordedTV, OTOH, lives on couple of 2-tb drives attached directly to the Sage box.

Anybody been here?

[davenlr]

Yep. Check this thread and see if its the same problem you are having: http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=58414

[PeteCress]

Originally Posted by davenlr

Yep. Check this thread and see if its the same problem you are having: http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=58414

I just checked HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE | SOFTWARE |Frey Technologies | SageTV | JVMMaxHeapSizeMB and found it set to zero.

Reset it to 400h, and now we will see....

I've set it to 400h in the past and never zeroed it out.

Who could be messing with this? JAVA updates maybe?

[PeteCress]

Originally Posted by PeteCress

Reset it to 400h, and now we will see....

Bingo. Got through all of PBS News Hour tonite with zero stutters.

A few episodes of pixellation/breaking up, but I'm 95% sure that's a separate issue - as in needing the antenna adjusted or replaced.

[davenlr]

Yep. Mine was set to 392k and Sage was using it all. Set mine to 400h and havent had an issue since.

[PeteCress]

Originally Posted by davenlr

Yep. Mine was set to 392k and Sage was using it all. Set mine to 400h and havent had an issue since.

Bump...

My problem is back again - exactly as originally described; but the setting to 400h is still in place as in

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE | SOFTWARE |Frey Technologies | SageTV | JVMMaxHeapSizeMB  = 0x00000400(1024).

I note

Setup | System Information | JVM Heap Size (Used/Total/Max): = 398MB/520MB/1039MB

Two observations:

• [li]Seems like Sage isn't anywhere near to using the max.
  .[/li]
  [li]The descrepancy between the registry setting (1024) and Sage's "Max" (1039).[/li]

Could there be some other setting involved?

[PeteCress]

Originally Posted by PeteCress

Bump...

Could there be some other setting involved?

In case somebody else is having the same problem...

It seems like in my case it was not the Java Heap Size thing.

Instead, it was the blocking on my RecordedTV drives.

My NAS box had been getting a little too full, so I moved RecordedTV to a couple of local drives on the Sage box.

When I did it, I forgot about the admonition to set blocking to 64k and would up with the default 4k blocks.

Re-blocking the drives *seems* to have cured both the stuttering/pausing and some intermittent heavy pixellation that I was trying to ascribe to signal strength.

Not knowing that much about the nuts and bolts, all I can think of is that, as the discs inevitably became heavily-fragmented, the time spent chasing down all those 4k blocks (vs only 1/16th the time for 64k blocks) was causing the problems.

[heatvent]

Originally Posted by PeteCress

In case somebody else is having the same problem...

It seems like in my case it was not the Java Heap Size thing.

Instead, it was the blocking on my RecordedTV drives.

My NAS box had been getting a little too full, so I moved RecordedTV to a couple of local drives on the Sage box.

When I did it, I forgot about the admonition to set blocking to 64k and would up with the default 4k blocks.

Re-blocking the drives *seems* to have cured both the stuttering/pausing and some intermittent heavy pixellation that I was trying to ascribe to signal strength.

Not knowing that much about the nuts and bolts, all I can think of is that, as the discs inevitably became heavily-fragmented, the time spent chasing down all those 4k blocks (vs only 1/16th the time for 64k blocks) was causing the problems.

I am having similar issues and just starting to troubleshoot. Strange about the block size, I thought this became a non-issue in one of the releases, maybe when v7 was released.

[PeteCress]

Originally Posted by heatvent

... Strange about the block size, I thought this became a non-issue in one of the releases, maybe when v7 was released.

Now that you have said it, I'm getting a little flicker of recollection along the same lines.

But the correlation in my case was pretty good: re-blocked and the problem went away. OTOH, re-blocking also involved backing up the drives and then re-populating them from backup after the re-formatting for the new block size.

So I guess there's still a little wiggle room there...

[heatvent]

For me the issue shows up when sage is recording and playing only certain DVDs. I moved the DVDs to a new separate hd and still had the issue. I moved my movies off that drive and reformatted and I am currently copying back to the newly formatted drive. Hoping this will be the fix and will check back when done.

[MattHelm]

Originally Posted by heatvent

I am having similar issues and just starting to troubleshoot. Strange about the block size, I thought this became a non-issue in one of the releases, maybe when v7 was released.

It is no longer REQUIRED by SageTV, but I do this on ANY drive that will mainly store large files. The OS has less to keep track of with the larger blocks, so will slightly improve the file access. Of course if you throw a bunch of little files on the drive, each will take 64K even it is only 1 byte, but that's OK with me. This is the only true disadvantage.