Video Stuttering -- during recording!

[dragon]

I've been having a problem with occasional video stuttering during recording since moving to SageTV v2 and new versions of Java. Of course, since the record process stuttered, the playback of the video stuttered.

I went down the bunny trail of trying different settings on playback, but that wasn't it. I also tried the steps of reinstalling drivers, getting new drivers and installing them, moving the cards to different slots, and even changing the hard drive.

Symptoms:
1) always happened on my Hauppauge PVR-250 card #2. However, both cards did not have to be recording for the problem to occur.
2) always happened when writing to my slave hard drive on the primary IDE connecction
3) always seemed to happen on an "important" show -- e.g., the premier of Stargate Atlantis
4) occasionally happened otherr times
5) the stuttering was not visible if I was watching "LiveTV" but was visible if I was watching it live via "SageTV Recordings."

I finally ran Windows XP's system monitor and saw that the problem was "page file" activity. I was running XP Pro with 512MB memory and an Atnlon XP 2500+.

I added another 512MB for a total of 1024MB RAM. The paging problem went away and so did the stuttering.

[Opus4]

What is the size of the clusters on the disks where videos are stored? If less than 64K, that can cause stuttering, especially once files start to get fragmented.

- Andy

[Nar]

I have been having the same problem. Only important shows even. I have been using my HP PVR-350 for several months now and the WinTV app works like a champ, but when I began to use Sage 2 something went wrong. Live TV is fine, playback is fine, but when I am away and expect my show to be recorded, I come back and find quite a mess. The first time I had nearly two dozen seperate files, some only a few seconds, most on different channels, but none of them on the show I wanted.

I started over, removed all my hard drives, partitioned and reformatted my boot drive and reinstalled WinXPpro from scratch. After getting everything installed, I added back my storage and scratch drives. All seemed to be ok, but after my next trip I was again disappointed, Stargate Atlantis no less!! We of similar minds I guess. This time I do have a single file, and it is the right show, but halfway through in starts to stutter. I know it is the file, since I have tried to view it in WMP and the PLAYA. Although, since I am not home to see what happens as it is doing it, I am a bit mistified, but since I have had this problem before, and you have it as well, I wonder if there is some thing to this.

Incidentally, I have had no problems with the program crashing, and my video out to TV has always worked well. I have had problems with a slow interface though. Mousing around the menu and program guide is often painfully slow. And before my major reinstallation I had a 100% CPU problem. Once Sage was launched, it maxed out the CPU, even in sleep mode. Thankfully that has not reoccured, though I don't know what the problem was.

I have 5 hard drives, all NTFS, C: is WD36 raptor for the system only, swap file as well. D: is a 120 Seagate for scratch work. M: is my capture drive, also a 120GB Seagate, N: and O: are 250GB WD for storage. The only other running app might be DrDivx, it runs on D: drive, while Sage runs on M Drive. DrDivx is always set to low priority. D and M were on the same IDE channel though, D: being master. Now they have SATA connectors, we'll see if it helps.

AMD 2700+ on Asus A7N8X deluxe & 1GB Corsair DDR cas 2
Hauppage PVR-350, ATI Sapphire 9600 ultimate fanless
RocketRAID SATA with WD 36 Raptor and two WD 250GB drives
Onboard SATARAID runing two Seagate Barracuda V 120GB drives, seaprately
2 DVD ROMs, and 1 Plextor CDRW.

[dragon]

NTFS, with default cluster size = 8 sectors of 512 bytes = 4K clusters.

There was nil fragmentation. I've got Norton's Speed Disk running regularly, and I checked that status immediately after the problem started.

I might as well go on and convert to 64K partitions. If I was going to have to reformat the partition, one day I might have gotten around to reformatting to 64K clusters. However, I plan to use Partition Magic 8, which has the ability to convert on-the-fly. Partitiion Magic 7 does this, too, but apparently not for NTFS, as the option is grayed out.

[stanger89]

Since you don't mention your drive setup anyware, a couple of suggestions for you:
1) 64k Clusters should only be used on storage partitions with large file (ie Sage recordings), since they waste a lot of space if you have small files (like on your C: drive)

2) IMO, you should never record to your C: drive, it's by far best to record to a separate partiton (doesn't have to be a separate physical drive) dedicated to Sage recordings.

Oh, and if you don't have PM8 yet, I'd take a look at Acronis Partition Expert, now part of the Disk Director suite. I've stopped using Powerquest products since they were acquired by Symantec, my last encounter with Drive Image was not a good one

[stanger89]

Originally posted by dragon
I've got Norton's Speed Disk running regularly

Actually that in and of itself could easily be causing your troubles. I've seen a number of occastions where it was defrag that caused corrupt/mangled recordings.

[Nar]

I have had speed disk interupt me before, but the virus scanner was the worst culprit.

[dragon]

Definitely was not Speed Disk, as it runs during the middle of the night. This problem was observed immediately during the recording of the show. If I used Sage Recordings, I could see the hesitation immediately. If I used the Live Guide, I didn't see the problem.

I'm using Norton's 2004 AV on that machine. That could be the source of the problem, but only in conjunction with the changes that were made in Java and SageTV since the 1.4 versions of SageTV. I am not a fan of the bloat of NAV, and have shifted to NOD32 on all my other machines.