i3 NUC: Pauses during playback.

[PeteCress]

Typically a frame freeze, nothing for about 5 seconds, and then return of motion + speech albeit with a second or so of accellerated motion.

Rewind, and we see what we missed - with no pause or freeze.

I have a couple of 3tb drives in a toaster-type drop-in wrapper where both drives are served by a single USB3 cable.

That's my first suspicion.

Or did I err on the low-horsepower side by getting the i3 instead of an i5?

[PeteCress]

Typically a frame freeze, nothing for about 5 seconds, and then return of motion + speech albeit with a second or so of accellerated motion.

Rewind, and we see what we missed - with no pause or freeze.

I have a couple of 3tb drives in a toaster-type drop-in wrapper where both drives are served by a single USB3 cable.

That's my first suspicion.

Or did I err on the low-horsepower side by getting the i3 instead of an i5?

[stuckless]

Just trying to better understand your setup.

i3 Nuc is a sagetv client, running windows, and you have a USB drive connected to it watching files from it?

or i3 Nuc is a sagetv client and the USB drive is connected to the server and you a streaming files from there?

Are these high bitrate files? 1080p or 4k?

Typically cpu wise the i3 should be able play your stuff at 1080p and even software decode mpeg2 and mpeg4.

SageTV does buffer some video during playback, but not a lot, which is why it is so quick to skip through videos and begin playback. Normally when I have seen things like this, in the past, it's been flaky network cards (getter lots of errors an dropped packets) or IO issues coming from the drive itself.

[PeteCress]

None of the above.

NUC is hosting the SageTV server and using the two 3-TB SATA drives connected via a USB3 wrapper for it's RecordedTV.

All TV is OTA.

Client is an HD-200.

No problems playing HD movies ripped to an ethernet-connected NAS box as .mpeg2, .mpeg4, .avi, and .mkv.

[KryptoNyte]

How exactly is the HD200 connecting to the server, hard wired with router and switches? Did the HD200 exhibit this issue with the previous server in the same server/client hardware configuration?

Have you tried installing the SageTV client on a PC in the house, or some other SageTV client for that matter, to see if it experiences the same issue?

[UgaData]

Does your NUC have any additional internal storage?

Hopefully you have an M.2 slot and Sata connection. I know some NUC's only have the Sata connection available.

You can try defragmenting the storage drives. Maybe setup a schedule task for doing the defrag.


F.W.I.W.
I am using a NUC as my SageTV server. I use the M.2 for an NVme SSD drive for OS boot drive and SageTV install. The Sata connection is a 2.5 750 GB HDD for recordings.
I also have a NAS for imported movies (DVD & BluRay), imported TV, and long term storage of recordings.
I am running Windows 7 pro. Viewing is done via a Sage Client, also on WIndows 7 pro.

[PeteCress]

Originally Posted by KryptoNyte

How exactly is the HD200 connecting to the server, hard wired with router and switches? Did the HD200 exhibit this issue with the previous server in the same server/client hardware configuration?

Everything's hard-wired Cat5e.

No such probs w/previous server, where drives were internal SATA and CPU i7.

[PeteCress]

Originally Posted by UgaData

am using a NUC as my SageTV server..

What CPU in the NUC?

[UgaData]

i3-7100u (2.40GHz) and I am fairly sure it is a quad core.

Have I ever had the picture momentarily freeze, Yes - but not on any kind of a regular basis. I have been running this setup for over a year.

[KeithAbbott]

Maybe it's doing garbage collection. What is your java heap size set to?

[Zogg]

Originally Posted by PeteCress

Typically a frame freeze, nothing for about 5 seconds, and then return of motion + speech albeit with a second or so of accellerated motion.

Rewind, and we see what we missed - with no pause or freeze.

I have a couple of 3tb drives in a toaster-type drop-in wrapper where both drives are served by a single USB3 cable.

That's my first suspicion.

Or did I err on the low-horsepower side by getting the i3 instead of an i5?

I believe you got a 9th gen i3. My HTPC is a 7th gen i3-7100U with 8GB ram running W10-64 and Sage 32bit. I run Sage as a service to act as a network tuner, and then run Sage client connected to my server for playback.

I never see the types of pausing you mention. I do see the spinning wheel between commercial jumps quite a bit, which started happening more frequently with one of the 9.2.X updates IIRC. But that appears to be waiting on more data over the network from the server, and not the stuttering playback you mention.

Your cpu should be plenty good, even if hardware decoding is turned off and the cpu is having to do the decoding. But I would check those settings in Sage and LAV (assuming you are using LAV filters) and make sure HW decoding is working. You can pull up Task Manager and look at the cpu utilization while trying different settings to see what looks and performs best.

As you mentioned, I suspect the drive bay may be the culprit. Are they SSD's or mechanical HD's? I know your options for external storage with a NUC are limited, but SSD's will always outperform regular HD's. If you have an internal SSD, you could try copying the recording from the USB storage to the internal drive and see if playback improves.

[SHS]

Originally Posted by PeteCress

Typically a frame freeze, nothing for about 5 seconds, and then return of motion + speech albeit with a second or so of accellerated motion.

Rewind, and we see what we missed - with no pause or freeze.

I have a couple of 3tb drives in a toaster-type drop-in wrapper where both drives are served by a single USB3 cable.

That's my first suspicion.

Or did I err on the low-horsepower side by getting the i3 instead of an i5?

What Video render mode are you using and what codec ?.
Dose that same file exhibit that same issue in other media player like VLC ?.
In case it I/O bottleneck with USB try this simple test, Start by add a folder to Video Recording Directories like C:\Users\(Your User Name)\Videos\SageTV\ close SageTV from running then copy that file to folder above then moved that file from USB drive to another part so that SageTV doesn't see it restart SageTV, Are you still get the problem ?.

[PeteCress]

I replaced the two USB3-connected drives with a single-drive NAS box and the problem seems to have gone away.

Would have done this with or without the problem just to get away from having drives connected to the NUC.

If I were truly obsessive I would have formatted the new disk NTFS, loaded the contents of the two old disks on to it, and run it in the USB3 wrapper just to see if the pauses were bco two drives on one USB3 or something in the USB3 connection itself.