Recording the Olympics

[jrandeck]

I’ve been having issues with my recordings of the olympics.  In the guide, it just has these huge blocks of time (sometimes 8 -10 hours long) that it treats as a single show.   What  I’m seeing is that when I get about 5 or 6 hours in to these files, the video starts stuttering and has long pauses.   Usually stopping and restarting playback fixes it for a couple of minutes then it starts again.

The files are recorded on a WD black 1TB hard drive, so I don’t think drive speed should be the issue here.  It seems like Media Center is just having issues with these huge files (some are > 50 GB each). 

I was just wondering if any one else had seen this and whether you’d found a solution.  How are you recording the olympics?  I guess it could just put in manual recordings to break up the big blocks.   Is there a master schedule somewhere of what exactly is on when?  It would be nice to be able to record more selectively.

Edit: Well, I found the more detailed schedule on NBC’s web site, so I guess manual recordings will work for me.  If anyone has tried other things that work, I’d still like to hear about them 🙂

[Aaron Ledger]

That’s quite odd. I’m recording every single XXX Summer Olympics program onto a Hitachi 5K3000 and haven’t had an issue. With my other normal slate of programs, there are sometimes up to 7 or 8 simultaneous recordings. The WD Black drive should be faster than my “Green” drive so I wouldn’t think that would be an issue unless there’s a defect in the drive. Are you performing any commercial detection? This could result in excessive drive activity if not constrained.

[jrandeck]

Well, I didn’t think I had commercial detection on, but I just checked and ShowAnalyzer’s directory watcher had gotten turned on at some point.

I have both the WD Black and one of the early WD Green drives (EACS) and I have fewer problems with stuttering when processes like ShowAnalyzer are running when I record to the green drive.   It doesn’t make sense, but that’s been my experience.  I cleared off the black and set it as my recording drive for the Olympics, but I may just switch back when I have a chance.

I think I’m going to stick to just trying to manually record individual events, though.  I don’t have the space to keep all of the Olympics coverage and don’t have time to watch it all anyway.  Hopefully the published schedule will be fairly accurate.

 

 

[Aaron Ledger]

There’s a disk throttle setting in Show Analyzer and I recommend you use that if you do turn it on again. Just letting it rip on your drive will likely thrash your recoring/viewing if the two are done simultaneously. I think I have it throttled to something like 5 MB/s.

[jrandeck]

Yeah, I had it set at 30 MB/s which seemed like something the drive ought to be able to handle, but according to the UI anyway, SA never gets close to that number anyway.

[Aaron Ledger]

Try opening up the resource monitor in Windows and you can see the drive activity.

It is not that the drive can’t handle that alone, it is the number of things that it is trying to do at once. A bunch of simultaneous operations can cause applications like multiple recording/viewing to have issues.

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