Regular interference on recordings - shrink scan?

mole_hill

mole_hill

Member
Hi all. I have been running the custom firmware for a month or so and have recently noticed regular picture interference on recordings. The interference lasts a few seconds but is annoying, particularly as my wife assumes it must be something I've done!

I have two HDR Fox T2s and am experiencing the same problems on both. I'm running the latest custom firmware etc. on both and enjoying the brilliant features.

I started to notice that the interference seemed to have a bit of a pattern to it. For example it was happening during one programme at 15mins past and then 45mins past.

So I recently tried to identify what the box was doing when the interference happened. Using the auto.log I have found it appears to be doing a shrink scan on each occasion. I must say though that it doesn't happen noticeably on all shrink scans i.e. very 10minutes without fail.

It only appears to happen on recordings and on HD but this may be just a coincidence as I generally only watch recorded HD programmes. I've also recorded the same programme at the same time on both machines and the interference did not happen in exactly the same place on each so I assume it is not an aerial / signal issue.

Has this happened to anyone else or am I jumping to conclusions?? Thanks in anticipation!
 
I've noticed the same too, I try and limit the amount of auto shrink folders to a minimum.
It will just be a CPU spike.
 
If you have sysmon installed, try removing it.

There is little point shrinking something that will be watched and then deleted, reserve shrink for recordings you will be holding onto for a while.
 
Thanks for the replies.

I haven't got Sysmon installed.

I have only got 5 folders with auto-shrink enabled but I will take that off and see if it helps. Thanks
 
I removed sysmon a long time ago because I thought that was the issue too.. its not. Or at least its not the sole cause for me.
 
mole_hill said:
Hi all. I have been running the custom firmware for a month or so and have recently noticed regular picture interference on recordings. The interference lasts a few seconds but is annoying, particularly as my wife assumes it must be something I've done!
Click to expand...

So your wife could be right (again!) if it does turn out to be auto shrink!!


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD
 
mole_hill said:
Hi all. I have been running the custom firmware for a month or so and have recently noticed regular picture interference on recordings. The interference lasts a few seconds but is annoying, particularly as my wife assumes it must be something I've done!
Has this happened to anyone else or am I jumping to conclusions?? Thanks in anticipation!
Click to expand...
Yes, been happened with my T2 of late. Thought it might be down to HDD problems. Ran a fix-disk scan which did fix some errors but just to be sure I re-installed webif from scratch and with the bare minimum of packages. Seen only one small artefact on a recording since then. Would be nice to nail this one down though.
 
I saw this several times last night too - brief picture blackout rather than blocking though. Haven't found a reason yet.
 
Glad it's not just me. I'm not using Sysmon or auto shrink, but I occasionally get both blocking and blackouts, usually on HD, though the other night I had it on University Challenge. At other (most) times I get perfect recordings. Puzzling. It would be interesting to see whether anyone with a vanilla HDR-T2 is seeing this.
 
I haven't been able to sit and watch anything I've recorded since I removed auto-shrink from the 5 folders but I have noticed in the auto.log that the shrink scan time has dropped from over 90secs to under 1sec.

I then checked my other box and realised I had used auto-shrink extensively for kids tv - as they never want to delete episodes. On this box the scan time went down from over 320secs to just over 1sec. So that meant the box was shrink scanning over 5 minutes in every ten mins i.e. over half the time. I hadn't realised how much time it took. Navigating through the media folders on the box also suddenly appears to be a lot swifter, probably because it isn't trying to multitask as much.

I also realised I had set most of my flags as recursive which I assume wasn't necessary as there was no subfolders.

HarveyB said:
So your wife could be right (again!) if it does turn out to be auto shrink!!
Click to expand...

I accept she's always right :)
 
An update...

So far (1 hour of viewing only!) no interference on watching recorded HD apart from 2 instances. When checking the log this time it was finishing an auto-decrypt on both occasions.

I use auto-decrypt and foxlink to link this box to my other HDR - a great feature of the CF.

I was wondering if it was possible / practical to restrict all or some of the scans, shrinks, decrypts etc (especially those that are CPU demanding) to certain times i.e. during the night? I remember reading something on here about the box waking up to check for OTA updates or you could set a specific power-on and power off time. You would then have to accept that you couldn't watch something the same day (using foxlink) unless you went on the Web-If and decrypted it as a specific action (or just use dlna).
 
The OTA starts at 4:30am every morning and lasts about 15-20 Mins., not really long enough, there is already a package that decrypts files between 1am and 6am called unencrypt, however you have to make sure the Humax is out of standby between these hours, the Humax won't automatically do this for you, so would have to have a 'reminder' set every day from 1am to 6 am
 
I wonder if you have something else loading your box? I have autodecrypt enabled for all folders and even on double back to back HD recordings I don't get any picture breakup. I do notice a slowdown say loading the media list but nothing that effects the playback...
 
Having re-checked I was recording 2 HD programmes simultaneously and playing back a recorded HD programme. Whilst this was all going on it was also auto-decrypting. Perhaps this is as loaded as you can get and thus a rare event.
 
The thing which has been shown to cause the greatest loading in the past is delete. After a decryption, the original file gets deleted, but after we had problems in the past deletions have been implemented as a series of trims to reduce the loading.

I haven't noticed any problems, but I do not normally use HiDef unless it's for something special.
 
I wonder if fragmentation isn't also an issue. I'm on a new 2TB drive now. Previously I did used to get the odd glitch on my old 500GB unit which was normally around 80% full...
 
I am getting the same sort of problem - picture break-up and/or sound glitch for 1 or 2 seconds - occasionally a blank screen and no sound briefly?

The only changes I have made recently are CF2.15 (of course) as well as Virtual-disk2, which I have now removed as I thought it might be the problem and I did not like the graphic "prompts" every time the HDR booted so I have reverted to a small USB stick as before to get my NAS to show under USB - in any event removal of VD2 has not cured the drop-outs.

I don't run auto shrink and have removed Sysmon as suggested above. Nothing else has changed in my configuration - I am still using auto-unprotect, unencrypt (everything - running between 13:00 and 16:00 daily when nothing else is happening!) and network shares automount.

One thing I remember from a previous interference problem - I had a suspicion it was the RS package causing some glitches on the recordings - anyway, have removed that (again) and will wait and see what happens over the next few recordings - which are ALWAYS HiDef if available.
 
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