Recording & watching HD TV advice (1 Viewer)

[Neild7744]

Hello,

Right Im after some advice...

I have 2 computers in my house, one in my lounge is my TV server and one in my bedroom is my client.

I have my 'tvtimeshiftbffer' folder and 'recorded TV folder on a dedicated hard drive.

Last night my girlfriend was trying to watch a HD programme i recorded a few days ago. Mediaportal was also recording TV at the same time. I also wanted to watch more recorded tv on the client. In total mediaportal was trying to play 2 HD video files from the same drive, whilst recording.

I encountered stuttering on the client PC, and my girlfriend said when she was trying to fast forward through the commercials the video would go blank and not respond.

My first thought is the read/write speed of my HDD cant cope with trying to play 2 HD videos whilst recording HD at the same time? As soon as mediaportal stopped recording live TV, my girlfriend said she could fast forward correctly the recorded tv ok.

My proposed solution then is to improve performance by...

1) Creating a ramdisk as RAM drive speeds are much faster and use a dedicated 1GB partition for this?
2) Somehow split or seperate my HDD so I have a dedicated drive for live tv thats being recorded and another for recorded tv? - Is this practical? My idea is that i would set a tv programme to record within MP. This would start recording on say drive C:, once this has finished recording it would then be moved to say drive D:. So in MP you could only ever watch a recording once the full programme has been recorded and moved, that way minimising the HDD useage?

There maybe a simpler solution...not sure?

Thanks[DOUBLEPOST=1384858855][/DOUBLEPOST]I have kind of proved this last night, when i stopped trying to watch recorded tv, and started to watch TV series which are loaded onto another drive. They play fine.

I have software for creating a ramdisk, if my PC reboots the ramdisk drive is gone, how do i configure my PC to autocreate a ram drive on boot up?

 

[mm1352000]

Hello again Neld7744

I'll cut straight to the point: it could be HDD... but it could also be network bandwidth related. Even if it is the HDD, it could be caused by anti-virus/spyware software scanning the timeshifting and recording files - a problem that could be solved with a quick configuration change. I suggest you post logs from the client and server for a second opinion.

mm

 

[Lehmden]

Hi.

I have software for creating a ramdisk, if my PC reboots the ramdisk drive is gone, how do i configure my PC to autocreate a ram drive on boot up?

For RAM Drive you can use IMDisk Toolkit. It's free, fast, reliable and without size limits. And with that new GUI it's also intuitive to setup. RAM Drive will be created on every Windows start by default also you can change this if you like.
And IMDisk also replaces commercial "Daemon Tools" or other similar virtual DVD drive software.

 

[Neild7744]

Thanks.

I did a quick test. I recorded 14 channels at the same time (6 x HD) and then tried to watch a tv recording on my tv server machine. No issues at all. Worked perfectly. Soon as I try to watch recorded tv on the client I get major stuttering. I exited MP on the client and played a tv recording using WMP. It worked without any problems.

I'm getting dropped frames and major stuttering. Tv series and movies play ok within MP on the client.

 

[Neild7744]

Would slow transfer speeds cause this? Just tried transferring a 4gb movie file on a local machine, compared with over a network and the difference in speed is huge. I'm averaging about 10mb/sec over my network connected at 100Mbit

 

[wizard123]

Add another drive and use one soley for tvbuffer. I have tvbuffer / OS / tvrecordings all on their own drives and i can do all the combination you described without issue, although one difference is my network is 1000mb.

 

[Neild7744]

So both my tv serveer and client are connected at 100 mb via a switch. Both the tv server and client have 1000mb capability. I guess this would be worth investing in?

 

[Lehmden]

Hi.

both my tv serveer and client are connected at 100 mb via a switch.

100 MBit is too slow for multiple HD streams. Replace the switch by a GBit switch (you can find some for 20€) and your problems should be gone.
I had encountered similar problems lately as I got a new FritzBox which slows down the GBit ports to 100 MBit just to save some Milliwatts...

 

[Neild7744]

Yes I've just bought a gigabit switch. Certainly streaming seems better. I had 2 HD channels playing earlier, one on tv server, one on client and didn't seem to be an issue. File transfer went from 10Mb/s to 80Mb/s on gigabit.