SageTV Crashes

[Lester Jacobs]

I think it's time to start a thread where we consolidate all the reports of SageTV crashes together. I've been using SageTV full-time as my main (only) PVR for the past 5 days now and have experienced two crashes in that time period. I've seen reports of SageTV crashes in other threads as well.

My main focus in starting this thread is to:
1) Clearly identify what is causing each of the reported crashes
2) Determine the steps needed to fix it (change hardware, Sage.properties settings, bugfix update to SageTV, etc)

I think we can get more quickly to the bottom of each of the crash issues by making one entry in this thread per crash. For each entry we should identify
1) What was the nature of the crash (SageTV froze, computer rebooted, screen went black, high CPU usage for extended periods of time, etc)?
2) What you were doing with the SageTV software when the crash occurred
3) Details of your computer configuration especially model of hardware encoder card used, OS version, sound card, motherboard chpset type (VIA vs Intel), Video and audio decoders used, etc

If we can collect all of this information into this one thread I believe that both the user community and the Frey team will be well served and ultimately this will lead to reported problems being resolved in future releases of SageTV.

As I am sure everyone will agree, this software is great and, for me at least, is exactly what I was looking for in PVR software. However I believe that stability is of paramount importance (even over functionality) and thus hopefully this thread will lead to a resolution of the few remaining stability issues in the software.
Regards
Lester

[Lester Jacobs]

I'll start off with my first crash report:

I was watching a previously recorded favourite show yesterday. At a certain point I began fastforwarding and rewinding through the show (using the skip forward and skip back functions) trying to find a certain segment of the video that I wanted to watch. All of a sudden SageTV froze while I was doing this. The video froze as if I had used the Pause command and there was no audio. Also SageTV ceased responding to commands. I left it for a while but the situation did not self correct. Ctrl-Alt-Del had no effect. I then pressed the power off button on my computer (which is an ATX soft off) and Windows began its shutdown sequence. Based on what I saw, windows seemed to be taking an extremely long time to close down each app that was running. Therefore it seemed that the computer was not actually hung, but under very high CPU load. Once Windows had shutdown, I rebooted, restarted SageTV and everything was normal.

Here's my system details:
SageTV 1.3.8
Intel chipset (845 I think)
WinXP Pro
Two WinTV PVR 250 encoder cards
Soundblaster Live soundcard
PowerDVD video and audio decoders

Regards
Lester

[pawn]

I have had a total of three identical crashes to yours, under the identical situation, with the exception that I could shut Sage down with CTL-ALT-DEL. It seems to happen totally randomly. It happened this week twice within 12 hours, then seemless for two days now.

It happened once with version 1.2.8 and twice now with 1.3.8.

System:

Intel P4 1.8G, 512 MB DDR
Asus P4PE M/B
WindowsXP Home, SP1
DirectX9.0a
ATI AIW Radeon 7500
Catalyst 3.2 drivers
Using onboard sound & NIC on M/B
SageTV 1.3.8 standalone
Dual WinTV PVR250, driver version 1.17.110.21062
Setup for Overlay, 2GB/hr recording quality
Using Cyberlink PowerDVD 4.0 filters
XMLTV guide data
yada

[dkardatzke]

Both of you guys are using XMLTV data?

[justme]

Originally posted by:Lester Jacobs

I think we can get more quickly to the bottom of each of the crash issues by making one entry in this thread per crash. For each entry we should identify...

I think we should also state whether it was SageTV, SageTV Client, or both that crashed. Most of the post I've read recently are about SageTv Client crashes. Specifically when the client is left to run(not in sleep mode) unattended for several hours.

Or should we start a seperate thread for SageTV Client crashes?

[pawn]

Originally posted by dkardatzke
Both of you guys are using XMLTV data?

Yes, but why would that affect the playback of a previously recorded show, half way through?

[ku71]

what codec are you using? I had the same problem, switched back to the default hauppauge codec, and it went away.

I think it got stuck in the codec. That would also explain why it's impossible to quit SageTv at that stage, if its main thread stops servings its message pump the app will never get the message to terminate. Not sure how that translates to Java, but either the SageTV code or the Java runtime has to run that message pump.

This could be detected by a watcher thread, again not sure how that would work in Java. Virtualdub IIRC does this.

Martin

[bodgadle]

I reported mine in this thread

http://www.freytechnologies.com/foru...=&threadid=800

Basically after being on for a few days constantly, sage seemed to hang. I restarted the machine and let WinTV record something for 2 hours, was fine, then i Quit winTV and tried to tell sage to record something, when i got back to it it had hung again.

[Lester Jacobs]

Originally posted by ku71
what codec are you using? I had the same problem, switched back to the default hauppauge codec, and it went away.

I think it got stuck in the codec. That would also explain why it's impossible to quit SageTv at that stage, if its main thread stops servings its message pump the app will never get the message to terminate. Not sure how that translates to Java, but either the SageTV code or the Java runtime has to run that message pump.

This could be detected by a watcher thread, again not sure how that would work in Java. Virtualdub IIRC does this.

Martin

You might be on to something here. I noitice that both pawn and I use the Cyberlink/PowerDVD codecs. Can anyone else who's seeing crashes comment on what codec they're using? It would be interesting to see if we could correlate the crashes to use of the PowerDVD codec.


Lester

[Lester Jacobs]

Ok, I've downloaded and installed the latest video decoder from Hauppauge. I've also set up SageTV to use this decoder. I'll run it this way for the next few days. If it runs for a week without any crashes I'll consider the problem solved.

The video quality of the Hauppauge decoder isn't quite as good as the Cyberlink decoder to my mind, however, if it cures the crash problem then I'll stick with it.


Regards
Lester

[pawn]

Originally posted by Lester Jacobs
The video quality of the Hauppauge decoder isn't quite as good as the Cyberlink decoder to my mind, however, if it cures the crash problem then I'll stick with it.

I agree with this. It's far less "blocky" and has less artifacts than any of the other filters I tried. Funny, 'cause most of the gurus say the Cyberlink filters suck.

On another note: I just had another crash, but totally different this time. Sage has been running well for three days. Tonight I hit the "Sleep" button from the "Home" window and Sage crashed.

It exited gracefully (i.e., windows shut it down stself without a CTL-ALT-DEL).

I would guess it's totally unrelated to the other crashes I had.

It's probably worthwhile to mention I've been home sick all week and have probably watched 50+ hours of television in 4 days.

[Lester Jacobs]

Well, I've been running with the Hauppauge decoder for a few days now and, no crashes! When I was using the PowerDVD decoder previously I had two crashes occur. Looks like the decoder was the problem.

So if you're getting crashes and you're running with the PowerDVD decoder, then switching to the Hauppauge decoder may help the situation.


Cheers
Lester

[pawn]

I'm on board now. Since I stopped using the Cyberlink decoder in favour of the Intervideo decoder (almost two weeks ago), I haven't seen this problem.

[rhari]

I reported my crash in this thread.

http://www.freytechnologies.com/foru...ighlight=crash