MVP Hangs during live TV

[mvallevand]

The menu and pre-recorded shows all seem to work fine. The issue comes down to live tv. Maybe the mvp just doesn't like baseball ;-)

Sort of like me after my beloved Expo's lost to the strike.

Anyway, there was a lot of freezing and restarting and sound getting thrown off from the video and all kinds of fun stuff. I've attached all of the logs.

Could you lower your livetv prebuffer to something like 600 and see if this helps?

Martin

[B1ackh013]

I'll try it when I get home. Just got to work. I had actually increased that in the beginning trying to help the situation...maybe I misunderstood its purpose.

[SuMo]

I've seen somebody mention to turn off encryption on the (WL)router and had no problems since. Might be worth a shot.

[B1ackh013]

Okay...no luck on decreasing the Live TV Buffer. Things seem to be getting more complicated. I spent a little more time with it last night, and it turns out that it isn't only live tv, but also some recorded tv. It is kind of strange, because it seems like it does fine with some recordings but hangs on others. Generally, when it hangs, the video will stop first, the sound will keep going for 1-5 seconds, and then when it resumes play, the sound and video are out of sync.

Sumo, I'm rather reluctant to turn off wireless encryption. I am a state employee dealing with healthcare information and occassionally do some work from home. Although I have wireless MVPs, they are connected via 100Mbps ethernet.

[mvallevand]

This does sound like your network can't keep the demux buffer filled with enough data to play smoothly. If you can run the mvpmc share there is a throughput test.

Martin.

[B1ackh013]

I've been poking around in some forums for other software that uses the MVP...found this post (specific to Vista) quite interesting: http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthre...stcount=23

Anyone have any experience with this?

mvallevand: I'm pretty new to mvpmc...could you explain the throughput test?

[mvallevand]

I've been poking around in some forums for other software that uses the MVP...found this post (specific to Vista) quite interesting: http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthre...stcount=23

Anyone have any experience with this?

mvallevand: I'm pretty new to mvpmc...could you explain the throughput test?

You can't compare sage and gbpvr from the mvp at all, they use their own dongle and drivers.

To test your network throughput, crate a Windows share and connect to it from mvpmc. If the share name is mvpmc and it created for guest access, then mvpmc will automatically mount it when the mvpmc is loaded. Copy one of the file you are having problems with to the shared folder.

If you want to try other option just telnet to your mvpmc login as root and follow these steps

mkdir /sample
mount.cifs //serverip/sharename /sample/ -o username=username,password=password

From mvpmc instead of emulation mode select Filesystem and navigate to the share (mvpmc is automatically mounted to /etc/mvpmc) selecting ok on the file will play it in native mode. For the throughput test instead of ok, select menu and the option Throughput test. Let it play for 30 seconds or so and then stop. On the screen you should get an indication of the bandwidth of your network. I get about 11-12Mbs, some get up to about 15Mbs.


Martin.

[SuMo]

Sumo, I'm rather reluctant to turn off wireless encryption. I am a state employee dealing with healthcare information and occassionally do some work from home. Although I have wireless MVPs, they are connected via 100Mbps ethernet.

Sorry, must have misunderstood, thought you were running the MVP's wireless.
I would leave security on also if I was handeling sensitive info like you do.

[B1ackh013]

UPDATE: After doing every tweak that I could find for Windows Vista and network settings, I could only do as much as extend the period of time between "hangs" in the video. I'm pretty sure that this has to do with Vista's tcp stack reprogramming and the fact that it waits 30 seconds to retransmit a lost packet. So, since this isn't the only problem I'm having with Vista (my video card driver keeps dying on me too), I decided to ditch it. Unfortunately, I just gave away my only copy of XP, so I installed 2000 Pro. Had some hangups relating to my PC running on such an old OS, but I finallyl got it up and running. GBPVR runs great, including the MVP. The picture quality (from the MVP) is 10x better than it was with Vista. I'm not sure why that would be, but there is a definite improvement. I'll wait until some others work the bugs out of Vista before I go back to it.

[HtV]

I know exactly what you mean,
I ordered a laptop for my daughter (for passing her exams), I ordered one with xp-home but the shop made mistake and put vista on it. Impatient as I am: I thought: well it should work, it has 1 GB memory a dual core (amd) processor, so it should be ok.
Well, it is more or less ok, but it took me quite a while till I got it running more or less smoothly. I think if I had known this all before I would have sent it back.