video glitching/stuttering

[brucer]

Hi there,

I've had a Tivo (Phillips S1 80GB Seagate drive) setup for a week or so now, a couple of days after I got it running it started pausing and glitching randomly during playback of recorded video (the problem was repeatable so the failure had occured during recording rather than playback), eventually it got so bad I knew had to do something about it, even the menus had slowed to crawl and were pausing while painting the screen..

Researching this I found most people blame a faulty hard-drive for this problem but I find it hard to believe that so many brand new hard-drives are failing in this way, I connected a UPS to the Tivo (I have quite flaky mains power out here in rural North Canterbury) and I thought the problem was solved but then it started again, some programs would record perfectly while others were almost unwatchable.

Now I suspect the problem to be software (due to the menu issue), in particular I think something (probably one or more of the many hacks in oztivo image) may be starving the CPU at various times so it's having problems encoding.. Yesterday I reimaged the hard-drive and set everything up from scratch again and so far it's working much better (although it has still glitched a couple of times).

I'm going to replace the UPS with one that does voltage correction (my mains voltage varies from ~ 210V - 310V), other than that I'm thinking of disabling various hacks to see if this helps..

Has anyone out there had a similar experience and/or suggestions?

Thanks!
Bruce

[Damian]

I'm going to replace the UPS with one that does voltage correction (my mains voltage varies from ~ 210V - 310V), other than that I'm thinking of disabling various hacks to see if this helps..

Has anyone out there had a similar experience and/or suggestions?

Bruce

Have you checked system performance directly - for example by using 'top' ?

Just telnet into your Tivo and type: top

This will display the CPU usage (load average). Mine fluctuates mostly from .4 - 1.0 and I don't have any stuttering problems. You can also see heavy use processes and memory/swap usage. This might give you an idea if CPU or RAM is an issue.

Damian

[brucer]

Hi Damien, thanks for the suggestion.. running top just now for a few minutes load average was between 1.5 and 2.5, mostly the top command itself and "myworld", next time I see a major slowdown or recording problems I'll run it again to see what's happening. I'm a linux newbie (I develop web/windows/palmos software for a living but haven't used unix since the early 1980's but bits & pieces are coming back me ;-) ).

[clyne]

Found this while roaming the web, Might be worth a go.

by buckster on dealdatabase 03/31/2003
http://www.dealdatabase.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=23154


How to stop picture/sound stutters and stopping (I think)
I was going mad. My tivo would freeze the picture for about 10 seconds, and then play about a half a second. This only happened when I was playing one program while recording another.

At first I thought that it was a bad hard disk, but it didn't seem to matter which hard disk was "active". Also, it seemed to be more of a swap file problem to me, and to add to the ignomity, I kept getting free space too fragmented errors in tverr.log

So, I erased all my old programs and did a complete system reset. Seemed to work for about 12 hours, and then, the same problem. I was beside myself, I was going to defrag. I had to do something

Now truth is, I don't know how to compile proggy's yet, so I couldn't compile the defrag proggy on the Tivo. But while I was looking for a "make" command during a telnet session to the Tivo, I found something interesting

fsfix

I assumed that this meant filesystem fix, and having nothing to lose (and there being no explanation under fsfix --help), i just did it.

And it analyzed all the inodes (file system names?) did some stuff, and about a half hout later, told me all was well.

And indeed, since i've done this, all is well.

Have no idea what it did, but it seems to have worked, which is good enuf for me.

I only write this cause I've seen many people speak of this stuttering problem, and it has been blamed on resource hogging by tivoweb. I'm wondering if fixing your swap space might also help (I know, linux is supposed to have a dedicated swap space, but what else could explain this?)

[brucer]

Thanks clyne, that's interesting.. I have run it (fsfix) so we'll see what happens. It started misbehaving very badly yesterday and I ran top and saw a process, dbgc-mcp was hogging the CPU, I killed it and the problem stopped.. does anyone know what that process is?

[BrettWilliams]

I had sound issues also on my Tivo, changing channels fixed the problems, but when I was recording and it happened, that pisses you off as half the show is usless.

I tried FSFIX on Thursday night and so far I have not had any issues. This is the longest I have gone without losing sound.

Fingers Crossed.

I have a Seagate 120gig, I wonder if the issue is common across Seagate models?

Brett

[zollymonsta]

I had sound issues also on my Tivo, changing channels fixed the problems, but when I was recording and it happened, that pisses you off as half the show is usless.

I tried FSFIX on Thursday night and so far I have not had any issues. This is the longest I have gone without losing sound.

Fingers Crossed.

I have a Seagate 120gig, I wonder if the issue is common across Seagate models?

Brett

I'm using a Seagate 120gb 7200rpm drive here. Not having any issues at all *fingers crossed*

[brucer]

I also have a Seagate (80GB) harddrive, unfortunately fsfix did not fix my problem.. I'm convinced it's a CPU load issue, when it started happening again last time I found running (telnet) commands and navigating around tivoweb would pause the video. Rebooting fixed it again for a while. I did read somewhere that the TIVO CPU slows down as it gets hotter so I'm wondering if the Seagate drives are generating too much heat, every time I've had problems the tivo temperature has been 38-40 degrees which seems quite warm even though it's displayed as "Normal"..

[brucer]

Just a postscript to this thread.. several weeks ago I replaced the 80GB Seagate harddrive with a new 120GB Seagate Barracuda and the Tivo has worked perfectly (*touch wood*) since.. so it was a bad drive afterall.

[curto]

Nearly everyone of the threads in the US comes back saying the same thing - i tried this and this and this and still no good - then changed hard drives and VOILA !!


Craig

[brucer]

I was in denial.. :rolleyes: