Recorded videos pause every few minutes

[gEd]

ok, let's narrow it down a little more.

Is it only when playing back one of the in-progress recordings that you get the problem and is it the program that you are watching that has the errors in it?

i.e. if you watch a previously recorded 1080 show whilst recordings are in progress, are these recordings ok?

have you checked cpu load during playback (have task manager running in the background in performance tab and ALT-TAB from pvrx2 to taskmanager to view cpu graph).

this will tell us if it is the playback of 1080 that is causing the problem or the playback of the in-progress (1080) recordings.

[BigMoose]

I'm recording 1 HD (1080i H264) and 1 SD (mpeg2) at the same time and I'm watching the HD recording starting to watch it about half hour after it started to record (it's a ~2h show). It is this one I'm watching that has the problems. The SD recording is fine when I watch it back the next day. However the HD recording still has problems when I watch it back another day or even in VLC, so its definately something wrong with the recording process. I know it's not the CPU as the HD playback is using DXVA and I get around 5-7% CPU usage while watching these. So it seems to be some bottleneck elsewhere, maybe disk. I was recording 2xSD and watching one of them while the recording was in progress last night and had no such problems. Although the wife set both recordings so I cant be 100% sure they were both still recording while watching one of them. I'll do a trial run on Saturday recording Strictly from SD instead of HD to see if that makes a difference. I'll be annoyed if it does though as I would expect an SATA disk to cope with recording an SD and HD and playing the HD...?

[gEd]

ok, so it is the presence of the additional SD recording that has triggered the problem.
i.e. Before you added the 2nd tuner, you could playback an in-progress HD recording without affecting the recording itself.

it has to be an interrupt conflict, PCI bus overload or the disk can''t keep up. (assuming cpu load is remaining moderate during this time)

some ideas for consideration:

I know you defrag your disk but run an analyse and see now many fragments the recording is split over.

If you have another disk, try formatting it with a 64K block size instead of the 4k default. Alternatively, create a new partition on you existing disk with 64K block size. Change recordings folder to point to new drive/partition.

Make sure your motherboard drivers are up to date.

download and run hdtach disk benchmark utility. you should see roughly 50 and 45bytes/sec for average read and write speeds respectively, while peaking at 130.5 Mbytes/sec for burst speed.

what model of hard disk do you have?
pc specs?

[BigMoose]

Thanks for all your helpful advice on this one! Yes, you are correct that I used to be able to record one HD prog and watch it while the recording was still in progress without problems. It's a 750Gb disk, but cant remember for the life of me which manufacturer. I'll dig out the specs later when home. It's in a Gigabyte 780G (GA-MA78GM-S2H (rev.1.0)) board with a 40W dual core AMD 2.3Ghz CPU (I'm guessing the speed, I over clocked it a bit). With 2G dual channel mem.

I'm running out of space on that disk so am going to buy another one, so will try messing about with block sizes when I get that! I'll do some bench marking tests on the disk tonight and will post the results later.

[Graham]

This might help to show file fragmentation. It lets you analyse individual files or folders. It can also defrag a file or folder. I have found that running it it repeatedly reduces free space fragmentation so that future recordings are less likely to be fragmented ...

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysin...97428.aspx

[gEd]

I installed a Samsung Sinpoint F1 1TB disk last year as it won a hard disk review in custom pc. It has been faultless and was a good price. I see it has been replaced by the F3,

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/productlis...subid=1279

I would be a little wary of the eco/green drives. they are much slower and only save something like 4W. I know every little helps but it almost feels like a triumph of marketing over substance.

I use Contig.exe mentioned by Graham in my postprocessing.bat to defrag each recording. By keping the file contiguous, when you delete it , you leave a nice big contiguous space, thereby helping to keep the overall number of fragments low. I only defrag the recording drive occasionally.

[BigMoose]

It's a 750Gb Western Digital SATA drive of some sort. Unfortunately hdtach doesn't work on 64bit Vista. I found some random benchmarking tool that did run that recons it's getting around 150MB/s with some of the tests it did. It ran one where it read two files and one was high MB/s the other low (cant remember the results now after messing about all evening!). The BIOS has it in IDE mode not AHCI as when I tried that windows hung while trying to install some driver... So I do wonder if the drive is struggling with HD record/playback and SD record... The new drive will be quicker anyway I guess as they're 300MB/s drives these days? Thanks for the advice with the green ones, I've read mixed reviews. I've upgraded the mb and video drivers and will have a play with the defrag utility tomorrow. Just have to decide if to risk trying strictly in HD and annoying the wife tomorrow evening! Hopefully a new disk with 64k blocks will help.

[gEd]

Ah, IDE mode is a problem of sorts as you are not getting SATA features such as NTQ.

have a read of this to see if you can fix it without reinstalling windows.

http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=45976

this will remain a problem even if you add a new disk (unless it is on a different SATA controller)

[Sykor]

[...]
The BIOS has it in IDE mode not AHCI as when I tried that windows hung while trying to install some driver... So I do wonder if the drive is struggling with HD record/playback and SD record...
[...]

So that could be your bottleneck right there. The HD can deal with it, but the IDE channel can't.

[BigMoose]

It's looking likely... I read up on enabling ahci in Vista yesterday and tweaked the registry and changed the BIOS, it then loaded Vista fine but crashed the moment it "found new hardware" and attempted to install the driver. So I'm guessing the in built Vista driver doesn't work with my controller which is a pain. I'll have a hunt for a new driver. Do MS update drivers in Vista updates? I've turned them off ever since they broke GBPVR with one that wasn't reversable...! I'm guessing if I cant find a new driver I'm stuck. I assume a complete OS reinstall will make no difference as ultimately it will try and load the same driver...