Complete Restart Of Sage Infrastructure

[Striker:WG]

OK, so the unspeakable happened the other day. I was tinkering with my main Sage box and the hard drive died and I don't have viable backups to restore from, but I do have some of the installers etc. archived so a rebuild should be possible.

I'm looking at this as an opportunity to re-architect a few things and see if I can resolve some long standing problems with my setup.

My main Sage TV box is an old Intel Core 2 Duo Q6600 /w 4GB DDR2, a Sapphire 7750 and a pair of Hauppauge HD PVR's. I have been using the Tim Moore FireSTB drivers to do my channel changing on Version 9 with the old SageMC UI applied.

I'm located in Canada, so HD television sources are limited, OTA only offers 4 channels in my area, so I use the HD PVR's to pull from some Motorolla STB's via component connections.

In addition to recording, the main box also does playback for our theater room.

I have a few PC's that connect as clients as well as an HD200.

The issues we've run into:
The HD PVR will on occasion fail to record citing that the source box isn't sending signal (or something to that effect). In other cases, the HD PVR will appear to "skip" as I will see the blue ring light blink off and on while recording which will correlate to a missing part of the recording.

Sometimes the audio will become out of sync with the video, typically when watching live TV, especially if skipping through portions of the program.

If there is any kind of unexpected power cycling of the media PC or the STB's, the firewire driver can fail to load in the proper order and then the channel changing won't work properly until everything is rebooted again.

Sometimes the Sage client will crash and the only way to recover is to end-task the sage tv service. In some cases a full reboot of the system is required.

As i'm using the Tim Moore FireSTB drivers, it only runs on 32bit so i've been limited to 4GB of RAM which I suspect hasn't helped my situation, but I tried the IR Blasting solution for years and was frustrated by channels not always changing to the correct channel number.

So all of that being said, at this point the WAF is pretty low with the issues above and the system now being completely down while I contemplate the rebuild.

What are peoples thoughts? Should I ditch the firewire channel changing and go 64bit? Are there other opportunities to improve the situation that I should be considering?

All thoughts and comments are appreciated!

[gdippel]

You may want to consider running Sage on a Linux, i.e. Ubuntu system. 64 bit Firewire channel changing is supported. As far as I know there is no Windows 64 bit version of Tim Moore's Firewire STB driver. I am currently have 2 HD PVRs connected to two STBs and use Firewire channel changing.

[Striker:WG]

That's an interesting option that I hadn't considered!

I've played around with Linux before but never done anything terribly serious with it. This will definitely be a learning experience!

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by Striker:WG

OK, so the unspeakable happened the other day. I was tinkering with my main Sage box and the hard drive died and I don't have viable backups to restore from, but I do have some of the installers etc. archived so a rebuild should be possible.

I'm looking at this as an opportunity to re-architect a few things and see if I can resolve some long standing problems with my setup.

My main Sage TV box is an old Intel Core 2 Duo Q6600 /w 4GB DDR2, a Sapphire 7750 and a pair of Hauppauge HD PVR's. I have been using the Tim Moore FireSTB drivers to do my channel changing on Version 9 with the old SageMC UI applied.

I'm located in Canada, so HD television sources are limited, OTA only offers 4 channels in my area, so I use the HD PVR's to pull from some Motorolla STB's via component connections.

In addition to recording, the main box also does playback for our theater room.

I have a few PC's that connect as clients as well as an HD200.

The issues we've run into:
The HD PVR will on occasion fail to record citing that the source box isn't sending signal (or something to that effect). In other cases, the HD PVR will appear to "skip" as I will see the blue ring light blink off and on while recording which will correlate to a missing part of the recording.

Sometimes the audio will become out of sync with the video, typically when watching live TV, especially if skipping through portions of the program.

If there is any kind of unexpected power cycling of the media PC or the STB's, the firewire driver can fail to load in the proper order and then the channel changing won't work properly until everything is rebooted again.

Sometimes the Sage client will crash and the only way to recover is to end-task the sage tv service. In some cases a full reboot of the system is required.

As i'm using the Tim Moore FireSTB drivers, it only runs on 32bit so i've been limited to 4GB of RAM which I suspect hasn't helped my situation, but I tried the IR Blasting solution for years and was frustrated by channels not always changing to the correct channel number.

So all of that being said, at this point the WAF is pretty low with the issues above and the system now being completely down while I contemplate the rebuild.

What are peoples thoughts? Should I ditch the firewire channel changing and go 64bit? Are there other opportunities to improve the situation that I should be considering?

All thoughts and comments are appreciated!

Me too....the only reason I haven’t upgraded to 64bit are the damn Tim Moore drivers and Firewire. 1394 channel changing is so much better than IR. It’s unfortunate for sure...

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by gdippel

You may want to consider running Sage on a Linux, i.e. Ubuntu system. 64 bit Firewire channel changing is supported. As far as I know there is no Windows 64 bit version of Tim Moore's Firewire STB driver. I am currently have 2 HD PVRs connected to two STBs and use Firewire channel changing.

How is this possible? I’ve never built or used a Linux system, so excuse the apparent stupid question. Is it a core Linux feature, or an open-source addition? I could see this being a good reason to start a Linux/Sage system...

[Striker:WG]

From what I gather out of this thread, it is included out of the box. Still don't quite understand how it all works, but it seems worth a shot.

https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=63662

[KarylFStein]

If you're going Linux and not used to it, (or even if you are), using unRAID is probably the easiest solution and something well supported here.

[Galaxysurfer]

I am currently running a Linux server on Mx Linux. I just use OTA so I can't vouch for how it works with STB channel changing etc.

https://mxlinux.org/ It is a beginner friendly Linux distro based on debian stable. It has a great user forum too. You may want to check it out.

I dont have the comskip running though if that is a deal breaker for you. It is more a PC desktop use swap out for Windows than a dedicated server. ( meaning the settings are tweaked for desktop rather than server) It has a good track record of working with older hardware. Currently passing Linuxmint & others in the popularity contest with users as per Distrowatch . You be the judge....

PS Success will be dependent on what you are using for Tuners. I am running Hauppauge 2255 & Quad pci cards

[wayner]

unRAID is definitely the way to go and firewire works on unRAID/Linux as well.

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by wayner

unRAID is definitely the way to go and firewire works on unRAID/Linux as well.

nice. The Firewire thing, simple?

[wayner]

Yes - at least it was for me. You have to use a special version of unraid called UnraidDVB. And the drivers should be packaged with that. But it may depend on your hardware.

[KeithAbbott]

Originally Posted by wayner

You have to use a special version of unraid called UnraidDVB.

Are you referring to the unRAID DVB Edition plugin?

[wayner]

Originally Posted by KeithAbbott

Are you referring to the unRAID DVB Edition plugin?

Yes

[kenP]

Originally Posted by gdippel

You may want to consider running Sage on a Linux, i.e. Ubuntu system. 64 bit Firewire channel changing is supported. As far as I know there is no Windows 64 bit version of Tim Moore's Firewire STB driver. I am currently have 2 HD PVRs connected to two STBs and use Firewire channel changing.

My motherboard crashed a year ago and I had to rebuild my setup I tried the Unraid / Linux approach. It was a pretty easy build but I had to choose between FireWire tuning or HD PVR recording. FireWire worked in Linux but not Win64 while HDPVR worked in Win64 but not linux.

How did you get HDPVR working under linux?

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by kenP

My motherboard crashed a year ago and I had to rebuild my setup I tried the Unraid / Linux approach. It was a pretty easy build but I had to choose between FireWire tuning or HD PVR recording. FireWire worked in Linux but not Win64 while HDPVR worked in Win64 but not linux.

How did you get HDPVR working under linux?

The HDPVR should just work if you are using a modern linux, ie, ubuntu. Just plug it in and it should create a /dev/video0. SageTV would just see it. For unRAID, you'd need to switch to the DVB kernel and it just works. Now if you are running offshoot of linux that no one has ever heard of, then likely you'll need to go through the linux driver / compilation process, although I'd avoid that route if at all possible.