Network-based Video Folder can cause choppy Live TV & Recordings

[reedmikel]

Just discovered that setting the default video folder to a shared network drive is probably not a wise idea with BTV, especially if HDTV is involved. I have a CAT5e 100MHz wired network in my home, but apparently it cannot keep up with the demands of HDTV. Even just Live TV(HDTV that is) can not play without choppiness/studdering. So I changed the default video folder back to a local hard drive(in same PC as HDTV tuner card) and now Live TV plays HDTV channels just fine.

Might be a nice enhancement if BTV had some type of wizard that evaluated the read/write performance of Video Folders - and warned you if a location was marginal...

[pwlong]

When I first setup the BTV 3.7 trial, I didn't have much local disk space free on the "BTV server" (my desktop), so I setup the LiveTV folders to point to my Samba server. I quickly discovered that while BTV had no trouble recording to the remote path, it never deleted the LiveTV slice files, and after awhile, I had a ton of stale LiveTV files cluttering up my Samba server (one for each channel change). BTW, the network is switched fast ethernet (100TX).

In conjunction with the LiveTV buffer testing, I also discovered that none of the shows I moved to the network drive after ShowSqueezing ever showed up in the "Recorded Shows" listing in the ViewScape. Restarting BTV caused them to get picked up in the listing. I suspect these two bugs are related, since they both involved network drives.

When BTV4 was released, I retested to see if they'd fixed the bug or not: no luck, still no cleanup of LiveTV buffers on a network drive, and the "invisible" ShowSqueezed content problem persisted. I filed a ticket with SnapStream support and received the response that they'd logged the issues, but that they were busy focusing on DivX issues and it might be awhile before they got to this one.

I solved the problem for myself by buying a larger hard drive for the BTV server and using local disk for everything. I haven't yet applied the 4.1 updates since I don't record HD yet, and 4.0 is working so smoothly, I hesitate to "muck up the works" by upgrading. Don't know if you've seen these problems, but it seems like the code for handling non-local drives might still have a few bugs yet to be addressed.

My 0.02.

[reedmikel]

I did notice that BTV (I'm using 4.1) creates files used by Live TV in the default Video Folder. Not sure at what point BTV deletes them, but the .temp MPG files are now deleted from the local HDD. Only thing left is some files named ts1.header.dat and ts1.index.dat.

Looking at my network drive, which used to be my default Video Folder, it too only has these header and index files. So BTV 4.1 does not seem to leave any extra files related to Live TV on a network share as opposed to a local drive. Anyways, I'm going to go buy a 300GB SATA drive and add it to my MCE machine that runs BTV...

I found that the Win Media Center application could not play HDTV smoothly, so now use BTV for all my TV viewing and recording. Makes me wonder if MCE studdering of HDTV was caused by a similar problem? I'm going to check whether I had configured MCE to use a network share for saving recordings...