Stuttering in scheduled recordings unless client window is open (TSWriter Continuity error) (1 Viewer)

[nordman]

Have same problem on Zbox AD04 (AMD E450): Stuttering of TV recordings, when MP client window is closed.
It feels like every 3rd second or so had been skipped during recording.

It works (no stuttering), when
- Solitaire window is open (weird!)
It doesn't work (still stuttering)
- after increasing priority to "realtime" for process TVservice
- after tweaking energy options (processor, harddrive)
- when using gadgets (e.g. cpu usage) instead of solitaire window

 

[Cybulus]

I'm lucky I found this thread. Kent, you're not alone

I ran MP on the same htpc (details in my signature) from 2009 (i guess) on WinXP. All worked ok. But, for some reason, it starts to stutter (in 2011), making recordings unwatchable. But not everytime. I had no time to solve it, so i left it alone, using htpc only for playback. But I wanted to get it work month or two ago, so I started do solve.

Reinstalled to Win7 HomePremium 64-bit. If I'm watching live, it is ok. If I schedule some recording, its unwatchable again, the same problem as Kent described. I tried record a movie last night, recording from 22:20 (-3 mins to prerecord) to 0:30 (+15 mins to postrecord). In TsWriter.log i found "bad signal" messages from entrie start of recording to 0:24. From this time to 0:45 was recording clean and without any errors.

I really suspect OS, it assumes, computer is idle, so it start to do some kind of cleaning. I slept, so I don't know if harddrives was unusually active.

I switched off services for defragmenting before.

EPG grabber stopped just before start recording and run again after it:

2013-03-19 22:17:04.667855 [scheduler thread(9)]: EPG: grabber stopped..
2013-03-20 00:45:04.749338 [scheduler thread(9)]: EPG: grabber initialized for 2 transponders..

I'll do some tests, will try workaround with VLC or SpiderSolitaire and let to know results.

btw: I'm really sorry for my terrible english

 

[corvy]

I also have issues with recording from time to time, but I am recording to a NAS drive on the network. For some reason it seems to be worse when I record via the scheduler than via manual control in tvservce configuration. Have you tried these and compared your results?

Just FYI found that there were quite a bit of "green" and power saving options on the network card driver. Since I knew my GBit LAN could be the root cause I upgraded the driver to the newest version and actually got better results. Now today I tuned the settings on the network card device directly disabling all WOL, "Energy Efficient Ethernet", "Green Ethernet" etc. I do feel it is a bit better but not perfect. Every 3-5 minutes or so I get the

10-04-2013 22:07:45.667 Recorderid 53e Continuity error... b ( prev 2 ) - bad signal?
10-04-2013 22:07:45.667 Recorderid 53e Continuity error... b ( prev 2 ) - bad signal?
10-04-2013 22:07:45.667 Recorderid 18dd Continuity error... 9 ( prev f ) - bad signal?
10-04-2013 22:07:45.667 Recorderid 18dd Continuity error... 9 ( prev f ) - bad signal?

Not sure how much of these errors we should expect but in % I do get very few but enough that the video stutters every now and again.

Hope this info could be of some value ... :|