Suggestion to reduce freezing at show end

[Ashman]

So, here's something I was thinking about while I was waiting for Sage to recover from a 10 second pause between shows while it tried to delete the file from the show I'd just watched...

Since I have more than one TV encoder card, and the other card wasn't being used to record another channel, why can't Sage start recording with the second card and use it to record/play the next segment on the channel I'm watching?

In this way I'm sure they could greatly reduce the amount of pausing at the end of shows. It seems like it would take a second at most to switch over to the other card instead of the 10 seconds it just took to delete the 2 gig file after watching a 1 hour show...

I've got two cards. Why not use them in the most effective manner? If one is just sitting idle, then alternate cards at the end of each show segment to reduce the gaps...

Does that sound like a plausible solution? Is there any reason why this couldn't be done if a person has multiple encoder cards?

[mls]

Not sure why you have such long pauses (10 sec). Mine is only slightly noticable, maybe half second to one second at most. Would have to guess something else in your system is to slow keeping up (maybe the hard drive).

Anyway, you really shouldn't be having that long of pause between shows in LiveTV. I could imagine maybe 3 secs on a really slow machine, but not 10.

[Ashman]

Most of the time it is pretty quick. Somewhere around the 3 seconds you mentioned. But sometimes, it's much longer, like 10 or more seconds waiting for the thing to catch up...

I've got a AMD 2600+ CPU with 512 megs of ram and 7200RPM hard drives, so I wouldn't think that system speed would be the problem...

[mls]

Other thoughts...

Disable the Recycle Bin and System Restore for the video drive. If you have Norton, disable that as well (at least for mpeg files) on that drive. In my opinion, don't use Norton at all because it is a big system hog. Use Grisoft's AVG instead since it puts hardly any extra load on the system.

Also, don't try to allocate the full drive for video storage. Set it to use at most about 5 or 10 Gig less then the maximum space. Reason for this is sometimes SageTV will run slightly over the limit before it has a chance to figure out how much it needs and which files it can delete by itself.

Don't know if any of these will actually help your situation, but at least they shouldn't make things any worse.