TiVo Community Forums Archives - Stutters resolving themselves?

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Stutters resolving themselves?
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Posted by: hinsdale

I have one standalone left (moved to DirecTiVos) upgraded with an 80gb Maxtor. The unit when first upgraded would stutter rather frequently sometime 2-3 times a show or more and sometimes not for an hour or so. Got to the point that I just stopped paying attention to them. After 3-4 weeks it suddenly dawned on me that I hadnt seen it stutter. This machine now never stutters. There we no modifications made to the unit nor was the environment changed. I realize the read-retries are not handled well by TiVo when it encounters a bad sector (causing a stutter) and am assuming that eventually all the bad sectors were re-written leaving a large space of clear drive for recordings etc.

Has anyone else experieced stutters resolving themselves after extended use?

Posted by: Otto

If it was just bad spots on the drive, they may have been remapped after enough bad reads. Or, you may simply have not filled the drive up to the point where it hit the bad spots again.

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<FONT size="1">All comments made in this post are my opinion and my opinion alone. Deal with it.
Otto, Zen TiVo Master - Moderator - AVS Tivo Forums - Tivo Underground, Tivo Coffee House
"The way of the portable computer user is as a stony path strewn with plugs and sockets, all the wrong size..." -- Terry Pratchett</FONT s>

Posted by: Russ Arcuri

I had the same thing happen, but I attribute it to a different explanation. I first noticed stutters after receiving the 2.0.1 update. They happened fairly often, and then after some number of days they cleared up. It hasn't stuttered since, that I've noticed. (I'm a little sketchy now on how many days passed before the stutters cleared up -- it happened a few months ago. I think there were a couple other factors too that contributed to the "fix.")

I assumed it was because the TiVo was so much busier with database conversion/maintenance tasks immediately following the update, and that eventually it got them under control. Also, around the same time, I got into the habit of telling TiVo to "make daily call now" just before I went to bed, keeping the indexing/etc tasks to the nighttime hours when I was asleep. There may have been other factors.

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Russ Arcuri
Sony standalone v.2.0.1-002
Hughes DirecTiVo v.2.5-01-1

Posted by: ursine1

I had a pretty bad stuttering problem right after the 2.0.1 update. I was just thinking the other night that the stuttering seems to have abated. But it isn't gone completely; I still see the occasional stutter or two -- generally no more than a couple of times over 3-4 hours of viewing. I have noticed that the stutters always occur when the unit is recording a program (and I'm watching a previous recording).

- Paul Goormastic

Posted by: TonyO

I have a single 60GB SA, and have never had a stutter problem. My video source is from Microwave link (MMDS) and is fairly clean. Last week, I transferred some pretty bad quality sports training tape into the Tivo. The playback showed a lot of stutter. I carefully correlate the area with the stutter with the tape and found that those were where the tape had signal problem. When the tape was viewed on the TV directly, it would lose sync temporarily at those spots. On the Tivo, it would just stay frozen for may be 1/4 second and then recovered.
I suspect that the stutter problem that a lot of users see *may* be related to the incoming signal quality amongst other causes. It may not be the sole reason, but it can be a contributing factor.

TonyO

Posted by: controlio

Actually I still get stutters... about one every time I switch to "live tv". They seldom happen until about 5-10 seconds after the live tv option is selected. I have a feeling this is due to the MPEG decoder running out of live tv data, and stuttering to get a little bit of a buffer. It's rather consistant, and I've done a lot of messing around to narrow it down to this.

I should rephrase... the stutters don't happen EVERY TIME I hit live tv, just very frequently. I would say it has a one in three chance... and it seldom ever occurs outside of 15 seconds from when I switch to live tv.

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"Wit is educated Insolence." -Aristotle

Posted by: hinsdale

quote:
Originally posted by controlio:
Actually I still get stutters... about one every time I switch to "live tv". They seldom happen until about 5-10 seconds after the live tv option is selected. I have a feeling this is due to the MPEG decoder running out of live tv data, and stuttering to get a little bit of a buffer. It's rather consistant, and I've done a lot of messing around to narrow it down to this.

I should rephrase... the stutters don't happen EVERY TIME I hit live tv, just very frequently. I would say it has a one in three chance... and it seldom ever occurs outside of 15 seconds from when I switch to live tv.

Yes my standalone still gets that, although i consider that a "given" stutter - endemic to the unit. Actaully even occasionally get the same stutter on DirecTiVo units.

Posted by: jkovach

I recently had my TiVo upgraded to 246hrs. I have occasional stuttering, and it usually happens about 10 times in a 5-10 minute period. After it stops, I've observed that if I go into System Info the GC and Index date and time matches up with the time that the stuttering stopped. I'd say that's pretty clear proof that the cleanup and indexing causes stuttering. However, I don't understand why it would be doing those things at 8pm, after having made the daily call around 4am.

Also, I was hoping some other people with large TiVos would reply and post whether or not they observe that the general operation of their TiVo is much slower now. I find checking the To Do List results in the unit not responding for 10-20 seconds sometimes, while scrolling thru the list. Making any changes also results in a long time to get back to the list. Setting up recordings (and stopping them) is painfully slow. And finally, my Now Showing list is getting sluggish too... I'm thinking I should find someone to perform a RAM upgrade on it. I don't think I'm experiencing any drive problems, because as I've mentioned above the only time I observe stuttering is when it is completing the cleanup/indexing.

Thoughts?

Jeff