hardrive being written too all the time

[ymee]

I have timeshifting active...if I exit viewing live TV and go back to the HOME screen and minimize snapstream I notice that the harddrive is still being accessed a lot, the HD light is blinking rather rapidly. Is this supposed to happen? I am worried that the hard drive will fail if it is being written to 24/7.

Is there anyway snapstream can disable timeshifting or writing to the drive if livetv is not being watched or the application is minimized?

thanks

[RobertH]

if you have always timshifting active then the system will always be recording from the tv tuner to the harddrive, if your system is up and running all the time the disk is gonna be written to and the heads seeking anyway because windows is always swapping stuff to and from disk (that is why they dont go to sleep with 2k/xp anymore)

the way harddrives are now you will probably kill it from constantly being on before it will kill it from constant writing

[ymee]

but if im not watching tv and the application is minimized...cant it disable timeshifting temporarily? like a sleep mode or something?

[Keith]

I believe from what you are saying that you will want to turn that option off. It will buffer as you watch LiveTV with that option off for the amount you have set there. Having that option on would allow it to have already buffered up that time when you start LiveTV to allow you to skip forward at the start.

My request would be to put time constraints on it like it is set up for recompressing, that during a time window that it would start and stop 'Always timeshiftng'. That way the drive would not be written to 24/7 but would be buffering during prime time, like just before I get home.


Keith

[RobertH]

basically regardless of always timeshift being on, if you are recording to mpeg by default then you are watching mpeg recording as livetv, this is stored into the same place as the allways timeshift buffer. if you have allways on then this buffer is being written to all the time, if you turn it off then it will only be written to while you are watching livetv. the only advantage allways timeshift was supposed to provide was that the recording engine would already be started so it would not take as much time to start up livetv or the recordings it would just simply have to reset the buffer for switching channels or starting a recording. the only other advantage is that if you wanted to back out to the guide or vidoe library you could rejoin the video in progress with out the loss of the time you spent in the menus

there isnt any real advantage to always timeshift other than being able to back out of tv and come back since most systems can startup livetv almost instantly, plus most people dont end up starting live tv back up on the channel they were last watching anyway.

[Keith]

My take of the advantage of 'AlwaysTimshifting' is that you can start to watch a show and have the ability to fast forward thru the commercials. With out it running all the time you do not have that buffer to forward and have to start the show pause it and let it build the buffer to be able to skip the commercials.

That is where a ramdisk comes to play and would be able to take advantage of 'AlwaysTimeshifting' and not kill the drive. I had put in a gig of mem and was trying a couple of the freeware ramdisks but none of those will address more than about 128 megs and with a PVR250 and a high quality profile you get no buffer time.

merrypig, aren't you using a ramdisk? Which one did you go with?

Keith

[Keith]

In regards to your example, with the timeshifting off I still have the ability to go back and review past buffer to the size of the setting under timeshifting of a show that I have been watching.

I tried AR SoftRam and they claim a 2gig limit, but when I wrote support they acknowledged the 128 barrier and claimed it would be fixed in the next release. I don’t see much activity in updates and ready to look to a paid solution.

Does the superspeed one support XP?

[Keith]

gotcha, and thanks for the info on the ramdisk.

Keith

[ymee]

Guys,
Youre missing the point, or maybe I wasnt clear. Im thinking of when I go to bed and the interface is minimized (reduced to task bar), at this point until I wake the next morning or get back from work in the evening I would rather it not be constantly writing data to the drive.

When Im watching TV and the interface is up it makes sense to be buffering for the timeshifting feature but when im done with watching tv there should be an option to automatically stop the timeshifting.

[ymee]

Yes I could turn it off manually but it would be much nicer to have an automatic flag which would tell it to stop buffering, like a switch tv off button...

[Keith]

Have you tried using SS with it turned off? I believe it will still do what you need in buffering.