TV Service stuttering or frozen every morning (1 Viewer)

[Alby]

I am a relatively new user of Mediaportal after being frustrated with Win7 Media Centre. I run a multiseat installation with a dedicated TV Server on a Win7 64 PC. The home network has four PC's used as HTPC's running Win7 Home Premium 24/7 with Mediaportal running 24/7. Addtionally I have a Windows Home Server 2011 managing all shares (except Recorded TV on the TV Server PC). The TV service will run happily all day but when the HTPC's screens are switched on every morning the TV service is stuttering (on any channel) or frozen. The user has to kill the Mediaportal instance running and re-start it or restart the TV service to recover, after that all runs well for the remainder of the day.

My first thoughts were the back up for the TV server was trying to backup the active timeshift files so excluded them from the backup, however this did not clear the problem.

Any ideas would be helpful, possible causes I am considering are;

1. The backup of the TV server generally is causing the issue.
2. The backup of the HTPC's is causing the issue.

Could a WHS2011c scheduled back up cause a problem, and secondly surely the TV service should remain running or recover automatically after a backup?

 

[mm1352000]

Hi Alby

Heavy HDD load can cause stuttering playback because it affects the ability to write and read the timeshift/recording files. So I guess the answer to your first question could be could be yes. For the second question, it is hard to comment because it is unclear what is actually happening - is TV Server crashing, performing badly... or maybe it is a client side issue. Some logs from your server and one of the clients would be essential to diagnose this.
http://wiki.team-mediaportal.com/Forum/How_to_post_logs

mm

 

[Alby]

Reply appreciated MM,

I will get some logs to post, however I am unsure about heavy HDD load as the backups that form part of the WHS backup policy and only record changes and having excluded the timeshift files from any back up they should be unaffected (they are on a dedicated drive). also if the load has passed by the time the clients are accessing fresh timeshifts some time later then the problem should of passed. The odd thing is the TVserver is running ok (no error logs) but the clients (all) are stuttering or frozen each morning when viewed. The clients are all appearing running without obvious errors, however as said before the only cure is to either restart the client PC or restart the TV service on the TV server.