Win 7 MC playback pauses

[SJMaye]

I watching closely the last couple days since all the motherboard updates.  Playback is better, but I still get a 1/2 second pause or video goes to slow motion about 2 – 3 times in a 1 hr show.  Each time I can rewind and replay, but there error does not repeat itself.  Each time the error seems to accompany hearing the hard drive rumbling. 

Since I can replay and it works fine it indicates to me the video is recorded properly.  In the past I did replace the drive with another.  There was an improvement for a week or two, but it returned.  All drives so far have been gren drives.  Should I be looking for a 7200rpm drive to store recorded video?

I still have not updated my bios.  I had some issues in the bios recognizing the updated bios file so I have a ticket in with Gigabyte.

 

 

[swoon]

Definitely update your BIOS and see what happens. After that, if it is still happening, open up the Resource Manager and try to correlate the playback issue with some task or service that is running.

[johnw248]

I ran into a similar problem which turned out to be a raid control (Hightpoint RR2314) for some reason the controller card kept resetting the drives at random during playback. Recording were fine, it was just playback and at random. I could never tack it to a service or application.

I would suggest that you try attaching an external FW or USB drive and setting it as the recording drive and see if the problem disappears. If it does, an excellent solution would be one of the Sans Digital eSata towers which ship with either a SilImage 3132 or a RocketRaid 622 card. Both of these have worked without issue for me and I now have a RocketRaid 644 in the Dell replacing the 2314 card and it’s running 20 drives without issues.

Getting the SilImage java based contol system to work for the 3132 is problematic, but the RocketRaid Web GUI or Management Console both seem to work well.

But first just try an external drive rather than fighting an onboard controller.

John

[SJMaye]

Updated bios to latest.  Found a setting that could help;HPET.  In the past I did not know what it was for and left it set to 32bit.  I am runnning Win7 x64, so I set to 64bit.

Will monitor the results and come back.

[SJMaye]

John and Swoon,

Just watched my first show.  Problem still exists.  To clarify, it has been this way since going to Win 7.  In fact, this issue helped me justify to myself to update from my dual core/mb setup to the current i7-860.  Truth is I just wanted to do it.  The thing is I never remember the issue with Vista MC.  But it was present with my old MB/CPU setup and still present with the current setup.  That’s water under the bridge.  I will just try to track it down now.

I like the idea of adding an external drive to determine if it is a controller issue.  As I don’t have one yet, I would like to ask something else.  Are there any drive settings I should be looking for? 

I will reiterate, in trying to determine if this was related to a bad secondary HDD I set the TV to record on the main C:.  This did affect the playback quality initially, but it appeared to come back with time.  I also installed a new secondary hard drive.  Again, it appeared to work better for a week or so, then problems came back.

Right now the system is very usable.  More of a nuisance than anything.  Love to get to the bottom of it.

 

[Aaron Ledger]

What controller are your drives on? Your board has two IIRC: Intel and Gigabyte. Try moving your recording drive to a SATA port on the controller you are not using and see if that makes any difference. Also, make sure you have the Gigabyte controller driver installed. I know you have installed RST and motherboard inf so your Intel controller should be covered.

[SJMaye]

[quote=Aaron Ledger]

What controller are your drives on? Your board has two IIRC: Intel and Gigabyte. [/quote]

I am using the Intel sata ports.  I have not yet installed the GSATA drivers yet since I was not using them.  Good thought.  Let me have a crack at them.

 

[johnw248]

From my experience, the recordings are usually fine, it’s just the controller that has trouble with playback. Don’t know why since there should be plenty of space for a buffer with all current drives but changing the controller fixed my problem.

If you don’t have an external USB, try and borrow one from a friend for a test and make a recording of an hour program. Play it back and it’ll probably be fine, then move the recording to your internal drive and when you play it you’ll see the pauses and stalls again.

I don’t know if its the driver/fw/or chip related but I just changed the controller card and it fixed it.

John

[Pooh-Bah]

Are you sure its not the recordings, rather than an IO problem? Is it an HDhomerun? If yes, replace the power supply.

[SJMaye]

Update-  Having a little issue with getting the GSATA ports working.  They require the preinstall driver.  I never installed these as the ports were never used.  Installing the drivers not going like MB documentation.  Doing more research now.

External drive-  In fact I do have an old external USB drive. It is a PATA drive in an external case.  I can try.

HDHomerun-  Nope.  All this is via cable card.

I feel pretty certain this is not the recordings.  Whenever the pause occurs you hear the hard drive rumbling.  I can replay and it works fine.

[SJMaye]

Still no luck with the preinstall driver, but I don’t think these ports will work for me.  It appears they are only for a RAID configuration.

“GSATA3_6/7 (SATA 6Gb/s Connectors, Controlled by Marvell 9128)- The SATA connectors conform to SATA 6Gb/s standard and are compatible with SATA 3Gb/s and SATA 1.5Gb/s standards. Each SATA connector supports a single SATA device. The Marvell 9128 supports RAID 0 and RAID 1”

[Aaron Ledger]

Remember, pre-install drivers are only used for windows installations when Windows doesn’t have the proper driver not once Windows is up and running. Make sure that you first go into the BIOS and verify the GSATA ports are enabled as AHCI. Then, connect your recording drive to one of those ports. It is possible Gigabyte uses the MS Standard AHCI driver for this controller.

[SJMaye]

I can do that, but something odd happened that made me think I needed the preinstall for the GSATA.  With the regular SATA ports they were working in AHCI, so I know I did not need the preinstall.  I did, however, update the driver to make sure it was the latest.  No issues.  When I tried to simply update the GSATA driver(not preinstall) I got an error message.  I believe saying it could not find the GSATA ports.  Thus made me think I needed the preinstall.

Will try what you recommend.  Hooking up should tell if there is a driver there.  I already verified the GSATA ports are enabled and set to AHCI in the bios.

 

[johnw248]

[quote=SJMaye]

External drive-  In fact I do have an old external USB drive. It is a PATA drive in an external case.  I can try.

[/quote]

That’ll work for the test, I’ve used USB 2.0 and Firewire drives as recording destinations in Vista without issue. If they playback fine then it’s issue with the controller on the Mobo. Another driver card such as the Silicon Image or the RocketRaid (you can get those with a Sans Digital Tower) will give you eSata performance that will work without the stall issue. Just stay away from the RocketRaid 2314. The RR622 and the Sil3132 run in a PCIex1 slot and recognize the port multiplier in the Sans Digital tower so the two ports on the card (each has two eSata ports) will give you access to 8 to 10 drives. (Sans Digital has 4, and 5 drive towers that can be set as JBOD, Raid 0 to Raid 5.)

[mpatnode]

Just another data point:  I playback all my shows from a NAS drive and seldom have any playback pauses or problems.   Remember a HD WTV recording from Comcast is only 14.2Mbps (roughly 2MB/s) which is obviously within the capabilities of any HD/controller combo made in the last 10 years.

One thing you might want to check for is what other system activity is going on at the same time?   Are you running Showanalyzer or DVRMSToolbox utilities in the background?  I found this killed my network playback when DVRMS started moving the WTV file from my SSD back to my NAS, so I scheduled things so it only runs during non-watching hours.

Can you run Resource Monitor from an RDP session while watching a show and see if anything pops?

[Author]

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