showsqueeze

[verybadfly]

I've seen the "multiple install" questions about viewing etc.. But what about using other machines on my network to do showsqueeze. They aren't nearly as fast, but my queue of shows to squeeze gets bigger alot faster than it can squeeze it at its current rate.

Or anyone have any suggestions for a 3rd party reencoder thats as easy to use as showsqueeze?

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Also would like to suggest some changes to the current showsqueeze screen.

Break the current data into columns, and add a check box
[] Show name | Created | Finished
and have the background of the row color coded to reflect its current status

yellow - waiting
green - running
red - failed

The check box would allow you to select multiple shows and either reset or delete them all at once. The interface is great its just a bit slow.. especially when its trying to squeeze a show as you administer the data.


Just some questions/ suggestions from a new user that loves the product.

[ticklemeozmo]

I have a P4 2.8GHz (with HyperThreading) and 1GB of RAM running on Windows XP Professional with 3.4.2 as the sole function for the box. I have run the following tests with perfmon over several tries.

While recording a scheduled show and watching a previous recording the CPU hovers around 25% and memory is about 200MB.

While recording a scheduled show, watching a previous recording and ShowSqueezing (on Normal Priority), I have run into no problems with any playback, recording or compression although, CPU nears 100%.

Showsqueeze DOES use all the processing power it can get (naturally, it should), but you can set it for "Low" priority so BeyondTV gets priority if running. This might help if you do not have an ungodly CPU

So, if you are spec'd out to the nines (as the saying goes), feel free to let your ShowSqueeze constraints run into the day where it might overlap the first recording of the day...

[duncan]

Is it possible to put BTV on a second box on your network and have it also run showsqueeze? I have the same problem (the backlog of shows is huge and drive space is coming to a premium).

Showsqueeze normally doesn't interfere with the PC but there are times when it seems to bring the whole system to a crawl (a realtively fast one at that - 2.8GHZ w/1GB memory...).

Any other ideas?

[ticklemeozmo]

Bring your system to a crawl??

Showsqueeze is just an "front-end" of sorts for the DivX/WMV encoding engine, so I'm surprised it would crawl your system.

I'd first try setting a "Low" priority to the ShowSqueeze process to see if that helps.

What are these times your system seems to have been hi-jacked by ShowSqueeze? Are you recording something and watching something too (all at the same time)? Are you compressing to UberDVD quality? Is this machine solely for BeyondTV?

[duncan]

re: Showsqueeze bringing system to a crawl

Given the backlog of shows (now at about 30...) to be squeezed, it pretty much runs 7x24 at this time. When I initially fire it up (either reboot or disable the time limitations when it can run), it seems to be OK. However, if it has been running awhile (can't quantify exactly the scientific term "awhile" but I'll say a couple hours for the sake of this discussion here...), the entire system - to include windows explorer - has intermittent pauses and delays in responsiveness.

When I pull up the task manager, SSBatchProcess is the only process that is taking any substantive resources on the system at the time. I have also tried putting the priority all the way to the lowest setting when this occurs but it doesn't seem to help at all.

It is re-encoding MPG2 NTSC DVD Hi-Res files to WM - Better *I believe* (I don't have access to the system right now...) quality (about 800-900MB per hour setting).

I am using a PVR-250 for initial encoding which on this system usually only takes <5% processor utilization so that doesn't seem to be a factor.

One thing that I just realized that I failed to note previously is that my system is running on an Athlon 2800+ processor vs the Pentium w/HT 2.8Ghz processor you are running and the HT *might* make all the difference in the world between our two systems. Just a guess...

In either case, even if showsqueeze wasn't absconding my entire system intermittently, the challenge remains that a single system of this caliber can't possibly keep up with the backlog of jobs requested given the time involved and the need for an alternative way of accomplishing this is desired.

Thanks.

[Eric3a]

That's the reason I don't use showsqueeze.

Hopefully the client (coming out "soon" in 3.5?) will let us showsqueeze from a newtworked machine.
I've got a slow machine set aside just for that. Though maybe it will be better to use it for SmartChapters..
Eric

[dvd_maniac]

duncan Is it possible to put BTV on a second box on your network and have it also run showsqueeze? I have the same problem (the backlog of shows is huge and drive space is coming to a premium).

Showsqueeze normally doesn't interfere with the PC but there are times when it seems to bring the whole system to a crawl (a realtively fast one at that - 2.8GHZ w/1GB memory...).

Perhaps fragmentation is becoming a culprit. When Hard Drives become close to full they get extremely slow, especially when fragg'ed

[duncan]

Thanks for the suggestion but I actually have my disk defragged daily and the type of sytem delay occuring here isn't indicative of slow disk access at all.

[johngaul]

"But what about using other machines on my network to do showsqueeze"

Has anyone tried what is asked in the original post?

[jmcclain]

I have had BTV trial installed on multiple machines, and what I do, is just break up the original content of MPEG2 source files and move half of them to my second computer (without automatic showsqueeze enabled on either machine) and routinely manually schedule some of the showsqueeze events to happen on each machine with the "delete original material" turned on. Then reconsolodate the compressed material.

In response to one of the other questions above (is there another program that is easy to opperate that can substitute for showsqueeze), I use VirtualDub-MPEG2. You can que up multiple files to be encoded in a batch like environment, and it has saveable/loadable encoding options (so once you get what you want for bitrates and encoding preferences, just save it and load that for all future jobs). Additionally, it has AWESOME easy to use cut/edit features, so I normally just go ahead and edit out the comercials. Get them all qued up for a batch convert/edit, and let it start cranking.

It isn't AUTOMATIC, but it works pretty well and I get to save lots of space and time on the commercial editing in the process.

Regards,

-Jeff

[jmcclain]

Originally posted by duncan
re: Showsqueeze bringing system to a crawl

Given the backlog of shows (now at about 30...) to be squeezed, it pretty much runs 7x24 at this time. When I initially fire it up (either reboot or disable the time limitations when it can run), it seems to be OK. However, if it has been running awhile (can't quantify exactly the scientific term "awhile" but I'll say a couple hours for the sake of this discussion here...), the entire system - to include windows explorer - has intermittent pauses and delays in responsiveness.

When I pull up the task manager, SSBatchProcess is the only process that is taking any substantive resources on the system at the time. I have also tried putting the priority all the way to the lowest setting when this occurs but it doesn't seem to help at all.Thanks.

When you look at task manager, do you see the memory requirements gradually increasing over time? In otherwords, does the windows memory in use go from 380MB after a reboot while running the showsqueeze reencoder to 1GB after 3 hours? This is all I can think of that might be hurting you (i.e. a memory leak that starts using a lot of swap space after a lot of runs, causing overall slower system performance due to a lot of the memory being swapped to disk).

Regards,

-Jeff

[johngaul]

Tested the remote showsqueeze idea. My BTV server is a slow boat so showsqueeze with that machine is extremely sloooow.

I installed BTV on a second machine (dual 933's w/ 1gb ram) and created folders to match the BTV server folders. I disabled auto showsqueeze on the BTV server and enabled it on the second machine. My hope was the second machine would monitor the record folder and start showsqueeze as soon as a file appeared. I started a 1 minute recording on the BTV server and watched the second pc for the recording to appear. Recording finished and apperaed on second machine, no big surprise. Showsqueeze on the second machine did not auto squeeze as hoped. Although I did manual invoke showsqueeze on the second pc which processed in a fourth on the time my BTV server can.

I hope this made sense and if anyone knows a method for the second pc to "monitor" a folder and auto invoke showsqueeze, please reply...

[dvd_maniac]

I have a couple of shows that I use Showaqueeze on. It has worked fine in the past for me. However, I want to start taking out commercials b4 I squeeze them. I record to Mpeg-2, then use mpg-vcr to edit out commercials. Then I try to squeeze them and it just stops squeezing at what looks like a cut point from mpeg-vcr. Has anybody done this successfully?

[pjmorr]

it would be cool if the built-in showsqueeze had a checkbox or something that would enable the cutting of "chapters" when it does the showsqueeze...

[jmcclain]

I assume by chapters, you mean the "smart skip" markings? That would be GREAT if we could trust smart skip, but the way it functions at this point, less than 45% of my recordings would get properly cut, and I'd end up missing critical parts of my squeezed recordings.

If you mean to try to individually encode all the separate "smart skip" sections to separate files, and then you could try "joining" the final output back together somehow after the encoding is done, well, that won't work without a complete reencode anyway for MPEG4/DivX, since there is "scene" compression (that I know of, probably someone has a program that will work that I don't know about). Plus, half the time, my "smart skip" marks commercials and the actual show into the same "section". In otherwords, a commercial will start, and smart skip might recognize the transistion and mark that as a start cut in the XML, but it misses the last commercial transistion somehow and includes parts of the program into the cut list. Bottom line, at least on my computer, smart skip is only right/trustable about 45% of the time.

-Jeff