Recording Stops when ANY extender Xbox is Powered On

[CaliBroker]

I’ve been using WMC successfully and it’s been reliable, stable and operating trouble free with no major problems to speak of. With the exception of one issue that I cannot seem to resolve. If any recording is currently active and if someone should power up any extender ( Xbox’s) the active recording stops and whatever is being watched on the main PC the screen freezes until the requested extender finishes the boot up process. The image on the main PC will then start again but the recording does not pickup and you will be left with a partial recording. Does anyone know what could be causing this issue and most importantly how to resolve. Any suggestion and or advice would be greatly appreciated, I’ve searched this forum but could not find a resolution as of yet.

My System: HP Pavilion running Win 7, 32 bit, Pentium D, 2.80GHz, Ram 4gb 3.5gb usable SSD for OS with a 2 TB Seagate Drive for recording activities, Win Experience rating 3.6

Note: When I initial brought this system online for WMC DVR activities it was to see how it would all work. Since it’s been operating flawlessly I now would like to update to a new system as well I’m open to suggestions as well.


Thanks in advance

[adam1991]

An extender relies on network connectivity to do its thing.

What kind of tuner are you using?

Win Experience rating seems low...

[CaliBroker]

I have a wired network, and using HDHomerun Prime for Tuners

Yes I agree but that's what's being displayed 3.6

[Rainey]

Yes it is most likely your low power PC. That is a single core CPU right?
Did it ever work without this issue?

I would guess it is the HDD write bandwidth and single core CPU. I would also assume you have the timeshift buffer storage on the HDD not the SSD. The HDD most likely has a write speed of 20 to 30 Mbps on that old hardware. When recording it is using almost all the write bandwidth of the HDD and when you start the Extender it hogs the HDD and the other stuff stops as the PC/HDD can not keep up.

So is the HDD Sata or IDE? I assume IDE
Do you have USB 3.0 port ? I assume No
as either would most likely help in this case.

[CaliBroker]

Rainey

Thanks for the response. I was thinking that it could be my PC but until I get a new system I will not know for sure, Here is some additional info in reference to your response

1) System has always had this problem from day one, I've just dealt with it.
2) Yes this is Single Core system I believe
Base processor
PentiumD 920 (P) DC 2.8 GHz
800 MHz front side bus
Socket 775
Chipset
Intel 945P

3)Yes all recording is done on the HDD
4) The HDD is a Seagate 2TB SATA 64MB Cache the OEM was a IDE but I upgraded to this drive when I decided to use for WMC function only.
5)Unit does NOT have a 3.0 USB port

Specs on my PC
http://support.hp.com/us-en/product/HP- ... c00585760/

[Crash2009]

I was thinking that it could be my PC but until I get a new system I will not know for sure

There is one way that I can think of at the moment, that would allow you to "see" what's going on with your system.

1- Open up Resource Meter and watch the graph's. Don't record or play anything just yet.

2- While you are watching the graphs, Open up WMC and let things settle down, then turn on the extender.

3- Continue watching the graphs and wait for things to settle down again.

4- Start a recording from the HTPC.

5- Start watching live TV from the extender.

I think you might observe that Step 4 & 5 max you out for an extended period. If you had the HTPC case open and your hand was on the CPU cooler, Ram, or Hard drive you would notice those parts getting very warm, maybe even hot. Yes, they get the job done, but I believe they are being overworked.

This picture is an example of WMC open and just turning on 1 extender on a quad core Phenom with 8 gigs of ram.

[DavidinCT]

Looking over the specs, a new PC (or at least one from the last 2-3 years) would help with this issue. Have you rebuilt the Xbox connection ? Deleting it from windows and re-set it up.

When ever I had some funky stuff going on with extenders, I would try remove and in re-build it, it normally fixes most little issues. I think you have a larger problem here.

If you like the case that it's in, and if the motherboard is a ATX form factor, getting a bear kit with a CPU/Motherboard/Memory combo from a 3ish year old computer, could be fairly cheap and make a huge difference here. IF your computer techy and not afraid to play a little.

I'm using a CORE2QUAD at 2.5ghz in mine, this is like a 4 year old CPU, I am able to run 4K video and HD audio with 2 extenders running with out a problem

[Rainey]

Well that PentiumD 920 is a dual core CPU, but it looks like that is a very old PC and its hard to tell what performance you would get.

I got a few low cost and low power draw PC's to use as HTPC's and i love them.
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... aQod71oAgQ
I got them from Newegg but this is the PC here for only $166
Found some at newegg for $149
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6883103987

[CaliBroker]

I will certainly try this test sometime this weekend. As stated this problem ONLY occurs when a recording is scheduled. When I boot up any extender and the main PC is playing live TV you would not know that a extender came online.

However when a recording is scheduled and your watching Live TV as soon as ANY extender comes online the main PC momentarily freezes the Live TV image which then stops the recording in the background. After the boot-up is done with the extender Live TV then returns but the recording is lost. So my belief is the system is being overworked at the particular moment.

On another note I just installed the Trial Version of Recorded TV HD and I've noticed that when I use the default Recorded TV strip the system responds fast. However, when I use the Recorded TV HD strip the response is very slow. Which can be viewed and witnessed below.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/4iqmcc2v29cvm ... 5.mp4?dl=0

[Rainey]

The PentiumD 920 has a benchmark of about 600
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup ... Hz&id=1126
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cp ... Hz&id=1126
As you can see this CPU is about 1/20th of the benchmark of todays CPUs.


The PC links i posted above with the J1900 CPU have a benchmark of 1884
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu ... 40+1.99GHz
This PC is a low end PC but has enough power with quad cores to do two recordings to USB 3 HDD and two extenders and Live TV at the same time. Each Extender takes about 25% CPU Live TV is only about 3% and recordings are about 12% each.

[DavidinCT]

I will certainly try this test sometime this weekend. As stated this problem ONLY occurs when a recording is scheduled. When I boot up any extender and the main PC is playing live TV you would not know that a extender came online.

However when a recording is scheduled and your watching Live TV as soon as ANY extender comes online the main PC momentarily freezes the Live TV image which then stops the recording in the background. After the boot-up is done with the extender Live TV then returns but the recording is lost. So my belief is the system is being overworked at the particular moment.

On another note I just installed the Trial Version of Recorded TV HD and I've noticed that when I use the default Recorded TV strip the system responds fast. However, when I use the Recorded TV HD strip the response is very slow. Which can be viewed and witnessed below.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/4iqmcc2v29cvm ... 5.mp4?dl=0

I checked out your video and performance on the basic WMC navigation seems ok (moving around the menus and opening recorded tv, when all thumbnails show up), nothing too slow. I've noticed some delay with some 3rd party apps on logon myself.

Interesting, before buying new hardware, maybe getting WMC back to first run, or formatting and rebuilding the machine might be in order.

Strange issue but, if your able to watch Live tv with no issue, very odd, in my years of troubleshooting/building WMC machines(I built custom HTPC based on WMC for a few years) I have never ran into this issue. It's otherwise hardware is too slow (but, most people would be shocked on hardware I have seen WMC run on and run pretty good), or you have something damaged or corrupt.

If you have something you can clone your drive, take a backup, format the drive, install Windows 7 back on it, setup WMC and test, see if the problem STILL happens, if it does, I would lean towards faulty or too slow hardware. If not, then it was a file that was damaged someplace and just get that up and running.

You can back up your recorded shows and even your channel line up with a few tools.

This is where I would go if I was you.