HR2X & R22 CE Release for the Weekend of 11/20 v.037E

[armchair]

Now here's a strange one that I'll be watching for in the coming weeks. I've been having a lot of pixelations on HD MRV streams that stopping and restarting a MRV stream seems to help. Well it got so bad last night that I started getting a lot of pausing when returning to play from using FFW or stacking 30skips which I have not seen since using gigabit switch. I fought with this for awhile trying to avoid a RBR because I didn't think that would help with pixelations. I finally deleted the bookmarks on the show that was giving me a lot of pixelating and it cleared a good portion of them.

I was standing in front of my BR DVR with audio muted and LR loud enough that I could hear occasional audio breakups and just started going through my UPL in BR deleting every bookmark I had on both HDDs. When I started, I heard a lot of audible breakups. By the time I deleted the oldest ones which also happened to be the ones with multiple bookmarks, the audio in LR was more clear. And it seems that most pixelating that I still get recover quicker and don't penalize the audio so bad.

Somewhere during this time, the pausing during play coming out of trickplay cleared up. I didn't do any RBRs either.

I'd be interested to know if the users here that are happy with MRV performance are using bookmarks at all. And is there any difference between old and new bookmarks. I had one show that would pixelate on queue got a bit over zealous last night and deleted them all, rather than testing to see if maybe older bookmarks were my problem. And now since all seems improved a bit, I haven't any old bookmarks to test.

The recordings I noticed most improvement were recorded in early June, 2009 and July, but bookmarks were added in progression from and not sure of those sporadic dates.

Am I imagining the results or can someone verify this? I suppose that it could have been a random freak of nature as well shaking the remote coincidentally coincided with my DVR waking from a slumber.

Just describing what I saw...

 

[cfb]

I shook the remote and it responded very good after that. The batteries are fresh but maybe low room temperatures were effecting it.

Maybe it just decided it didnt want to be shaken anymore, and told the receiver to pay attention!

I have lots of slow and dropped or double key responses when in RF or IR, actually seems worse in RF which seems counter-intuitive. You'd think RF would be more reliable than IR. But I've always had that, since 017F or whatever was on my 20's when I first got them. Some releases its better, some much better, but its always there. I've just gotten in the habit of hitting a button and then waiting a few seconds to see if it was going to 'get it'. or not.

I've had the splats in both local and MRV viewing the last few weeks. Had them in MRV all along although they seemed to be better last week. The local splats showed up last week, and they're usually accompanied by a nice audio crackle-pop that my tv mutes down because I have it set to clip off sudden loud sound changes. Others are reporting playback problems like this, both local and mrv.

 

[cfb]

After some testing last night, bi-directional MRV is still a no-go. Audio cuts in and out, video drops, etc when watching a kids animation from one receiver to another while watching monday night football in the other direction.

In looking into the tivo HD forums, where the tivo HD uses a similar cpu, chipset and network interface as the HR2x's, tivo users are seeing that the platform tops out at between 15 and 24Mb/s of total throughput. So its possible that each HR2x will only be able to handle one MRV/directv2pc stream in or out at a time, which probably explains why they limited the streaming to one stream. I'm guessing they might end up limiting to either one in or one out, but not both because it just doesnt work unless both streams are SD.

In my case, its two HR20-100's (which have somewhat faster parts vs the HR21/22/23) hardwired to a gigabit switch thats cascaded off my router. Just cant get any better/faster on the physical end of this.

Whats reallllly strange is in looking at the tivo folks results, there is also a pretty wide variance in what people reported for max throughput with the same tivo hardware...15-17 for some, 20 for others, 22-24 for others. My guess is that each of those had some very different things going on in the box, like more season passes, more wishlists, more guide data, more channels, etc.

Which means when the HR2x is doing more stuff than just sitting there spooning out an MRV stream, its total possible network throughput may drop. If it drops below ~15-17Mb/s, even a single HD MRV stream might start to glitch.

So I think I might have figured out why some people have glitchless MRV and some have it glitch so bad its unwatchable. Once physical network issues are resolved and removed from the equation, it may just be that some peoples demands on the box are higher than other users, and their MRV glitchiness is correlated to that extra work.

A user with 50 series links on both boxes, recording both tuners all the time (or even an extra OTA on the 20's), doing VOD, lots of guide data processing, searching for stuff, keyword autorecords, etc...vs someone with 10-15 series links that record once each a week and dont do much else.

My experience with disconnecting my receivers from the internet and just cabling one directly to the other improved MRV glitching and overall performance, so that fits in with the limited throughput/limited load theory.

 

[hdtvtechno]

one issue it takes too long to delete a saved program

 

[cfb]

I noticed that change a few CE's ago. I think they were having some problems with people deleting shows off of another dvr that someone else was still watching. I noticed it used to let you do that, the show would disappear, but whoever was watching it could continue to watch it to the end, then it'd be gone.

Now it gives you an error that someone else is watching it and you cant delete it.

So I think they're doing a little more handshaking on the deletes and its just waiting for the a-ok before its actually gone.

A couple of times when deleting I've had an error flash on the screen for about 1/2 second, something about not being able to complete the deletion, then it does delete it without problems.