I could use some help troubleshooting an unraid problem.  I just recently purchased  the pro license and am now using a cache drive in my system.  Once I got the cache drive up and running I had my HTPC running SageTV record HD TV shows directly to my unraid server.  Last night I was recording 2 TV shows with my Ethernet TV tuner HDhomeRun while playing back a recording from a couple of nights ago with SageTV’s HD100 extender.  Every couple of minutes I got some pixelization and video stutter.  How should I go about trouble shooting this – is recording two shows will playing back another HD show too much bandwith for the Ethernet?  I am using the unofficial Supermicro Motherboard using the onboard Ethernet  port,  2GB ram and a E1200 processor.  I know in windows you have tools to evaluate system performance, but what would I use in Linux to monitor performance and determine the bottleneck? 

 

Unfortunately last night I wasn’t able to stay awake long enough for the recordings to end in an effort to see if the pixelization would stop once the recordings were done.  I will try this tonight, in addition to playing the recording again to make sure there is no issue with the source material. 

Should I try the 4.5 beta – does it have any improvements that may help?  Any suggestions or tips will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Dan

 

I can't 3 recorded HD streams as being too much data for Gige.

 

Try writing directly to the cache drive - set the disk shares as read/write and write directly to it instead of to the share and see what happens. Of course, this is assuming you're writing to a user share eg //tower/TV_Shows or something like that. You would use //tower/cache/TV_Shows instead. Well, assuming the cache drive would be shared as "cache" since I've never tried it and don't really know.

 

Peter

 

The first item you always want to determine is whether the problem is related to the recording or the playback.  You test that by playing it back for a minute or two, noting the time and nature of the stutter, then repeating the playback of the same material, and checking to see if the stutter is identical in nature and times of stutter.  If it is exactly the same each time you play it back, then the problem is in the recording, otherwise, it is a playback issue.  You cannot proceed further without knowing this basic fact, about the source of the stutter.  In my inexpert opinion, it is more commonly a playback issue.

I have determined that the error is with the recording - I am not sure if ABC was having issues that night or not - but the issue was definitely source/tuner related and not unraid related.  Thanks everyone for your suggestions!

 

Dan