Struggling to record and also play HD channels simultaneously

R

Rob Singlehurst

Member
This has happened a couple of times now, the missus had recorded Strictly and then when watching the Saturday edition last night while the results show was recording we get skipping / freezing of the picture / no audio for several seconds at a time. I ran fixdisk on the HDD yesterday afternoon - no errors and then last night ran the long disk checker and no errors either.
Initially I thought it was connected with the disk overheating as I had issues with the fan - see my previous post https://hummy.tv/forum/threads/usb-stick-s-not-seen-when-trying-to-install-cf.10753/
but the disk is now running at about 35 degrees so it's not that.
Any thoughts?
 
Did the recording suffer from the same break ups? if so was it raining?. I had similar issues when it rained heavily and water was getting inside my ancient coax cable with even moderate rain never causing a problem. Also it seemed to affect only some channels with others still receiving a perfect picture.
 
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trog said:
Did the recording suffer from the same break ups? if so was it raining?. I had similar issues when it rained heavily and water was getting inside my ancient coax cable with even moderate rain never causing a problem. Also it seemed to affect only some channels with others still receiving a perfect picture.
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It's done it for a few weekends now so I'm pretty sure it's not related to that. I will however, check through the recording when the box isn't doing anything else and see if the recording itself is ok. It seems to be down to the cpu struggling with the workload when recording as well - it's mainly skipping / freezing etc when there is a lot going on onscreen. I suspect that if I set it to record the SD channel then all of these issues will go away - just strange that it's only recently started doing it.
 
Rob Singlehurst said:
I suspect that if I set it to record the SD channel then all of these issues will go away - just strange that it's only recently started doing it.
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During stress testing I have had many HiDef streams simultaneously (I can't recall where I posted about it now but it was a long time ago, I think it may have been as many as eight). I'm pretty sure a lot of it is handled by DMA (hardware) rather than the CPU, but you might like to check you don't have a layer of dust causing the SoC to overheat.

Bear in mind the temperature reading displayed through the WebIF is the HDD temp, not the system temp.
 
Black Hole said:
During stress testing I have had many HiDef streams simultaneously (I can't recall where I posted about it now but it was a long time ago, I think it may have been as many as eight). I'm pretty sure a lot of it is handled by DMA (hardware) rather than the CPU, but you might like to check you don't have a layer of dust causing the SoC to overheat.

Bear in mind the temperature reading displayed through the WebIF is the HDD temp, not the system temp.
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Hmmm, I think you might be right about the dust! I'll bring it into work tomorrow and give it a good (but gentle) clean out with an airline.
 
In my location HD reception is sometimes intermittent due to nearby woods while SD is OK

You could check and report your signal strengths and quality using the hidden service menu (Red, Green, Yellow, Blue, Green, Yellow, Blue) to access the live signal data
 
MymsMan said:
In my location HD reception is sometimes intermittent due to nearby woods while SD is OK

You could check and report your signal strengths and quality using the hidden service menu (Red, Green, Yellow, Blue, Green, Yellow, Blue) to access the live signal data
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I'll have a look at that and take a note of the various signal strength / quality values. Pretty sure that the recording itself was clean - it was just struggling to keep up with recording and playing back. I will check that tonight.
 
Another thought, have you installed the undelete (dustbin) package yet? Deleting recordings without using the dustbin can cause interruptions in both recordings and playback.
 
MymsMan said:
Another thought, have you installed the undelete (dustbin) package yet? Deleting recordings without using the dustbin can cause interruptions in both recordings and playback.
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Yes, I've had that installed for years - been a life-saver more than a couple of times :)
 
Rob Singlehurst said:
Yes, I've had that installed for years - been a life-saver more than a couple of times :)
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You should also specify Create backup files in dustbin for decrypt and shrink? YES in auto processing settings so that you don't auto decrypt deleting recordings in the background
 
Rob Singlehurst said:
while the results show was recording we get skipping / freezing of the picture / no audio for several seconds at a time
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Was it decrypting anything at the time? I had to enable the options to suspend automatic processing whilst recording or about to record.
Replaying whilst recording is a large part of the life of mine and it never glitches doing that.
 
prpr said:
Was it decrypting anything at the time? I had to enable the options to suspend automatic processing whilst recording or about to record.
Replaying whilst recording is a large part of the life of mine and it never glitches doing that.
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Yes, it's possible, I also have those options enabled but might increase the "how many minutes is soon" value from 20 to an hour. It doesn't record a massive amount anyway so there is plenty of time available for decrypting / shrinking / ad removal etc.
 
Rob Singlehurst said:
It doesn't record a massive amount anyway so there is plenty of time available for decrypting / shrinking / ad removal etc.
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But is the machine awake when it is not recording? You might need to schedule a repeating reminder fo an hour or so in the early hours of the morning to give it an uninterrupted period to process the days recordings.

Ad detection in chaserun mode is also a candidate for triggering disruption since it doing a lot of heavy duty processing.

Humaxes seem to have a lot of variability in how sensistive they are to background processing - some people happily let auto processing run while others need to shut everything extraneous down while recording.
 
MymsMan said:
But is the machine awake when it is not recording? You might need to schedule a repeating reminder fo an hour or so in the early hours of the morning to give it an uninterrupted period to process the days recordings.

Ad detection in chaserun mode is also a candidate for triggering disruption since it doing a lot of heavy duty processing.

Humaxes seem to have a lot of variability in how sensistive they are to background processing - some people happily let auto processing run while others need to shut everything extraneous down while recording
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True, it just has the standard 3 hours idle before going into standby so I might look at setting up a reminder. I don't use the chaserun mode for ad detection as I had issues with that as well when it first came out. Strange how they vary so much...
 
Is it possibly down to the HDD that is fitted perhaps? ...
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More likely, to the under-the-hood performance of the HDD. The disk firmware can be recovering bad reads or failing writes silently at the cost of increased delay. If that happens in a record or playback operation, the Humax settop program might aggressively time out the operation at the cost of an apparent glitch using low-level AV disk options. A CF add-on program running in the background would just block until the operation succeeds or fails irretrievably, possibly affecting the settop program's AV pipeline.

In such a case, a replacement disk might make the difference.
 
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