Having Two Genie's?

What evidence do you have for this, other than "Directv sucks and everything they do is crap"?

 

I have an HR44 and an HR24. The UX on the HR24 has become "annoying" in comparison to the HR44 (i.e., the speed, lack of Season/Episode info, etc.).

I certainly wish I could have two Genies, just for the simple benefit of a consistent UX.

 

Database functionality is not likely to be an issue. For one thing, given the relatively small amount of data the database actually needs to hold, something as simple as an ISAM database would work just fine. Given the several good performing public domain SQL database engines out there (mySQL, PostGRES, etc.) I seriously doubt database performance is a problem. The issues with performance are more likely centered around the need to do a lot of housekeeping for most functions, while still recording up to 5 HD video streams and playing back a few more. If anything, I would expect disk and general I/O bus contention is the major bottleneck.

 

On a genie you can have up to 11 Hi Definition "streams" being utilized from the hard drive at one time. That's quite a few. .

 

Exactly...while that doesn't overload the SATA bus, when combined with all the various checks and updates a DVR is doing almost constantly, it can be quite a load on the I/O subsystem. Tivo takes the approach of off-loading a lot of the guide data processing to a server, while DirecTV does it in the DVR for the most part. That can be both a good thing and a bad thing...in most cases it speeds things up (the DVR just sends a request to a much bigger engine which returns just the results) but if the server gets busy, or there is internet traffic congestion, you end up looking at a blue spinning circle against a black screen. Dish takes the approach of caching everything in memory, which results in needing to reboot the DVR daily to flush the cache.

Pick your poison.

BTW, I thought the limit was 3 remote and one local outbound stream, while recording up to 5, for a total of 9.

 

How you figure 11? I can come up with 9.

 

SQL is overkill. Postgres is far too big for embedded. If it's SQL it's probably sqlite.

My money is on inadequate memory. Compounded by Java pig.

It really has to be memory and/or processor. Disk performance hasn't changed in many years. Yet perceived performance gets big improvements with new generation receivers.

 

Given that each stream is on average less than 1 MB/sec, and it is big chunks of sequential I/O, I very much doubt that disk performance has anything to do with the Genie's performance.

This could be verified by temporarily trying a faster hard drive or better yet a SSD. If it does cause a significant improvement, it isn't because of the up to 11 streams, but would mean there are a lot of small reads/writes that are unrelated to the actual recording/streaming functions.

 

Much of this is likely handled through DMA.

The most popular embedded database is probably sqlite and it should be up to the task. ISAM becomes much less interesting as column sizes (especially the program description) become widely variable.

Using something porcine like Java or Javascript, as unixguru suggests, could be a big downer for performance.

I'm not on board with the idea that hard drive performance of cheap hard drives hasn't increased perceptibly in many years.

 

Harsh declared:


"I'm not on board with the idea that hard drive performance of cheap hard drives hasn't increased perceptibly in many years."

Mind rephrasing that, omitting the double negative and ambiguity?

 

He's so negative in general, that he can't even write a sentence without a double negative

 

With a genie, you can...

Record 5 via sat tuners
Record one via vod thru internet
MRV three feeds out from previously recorded programs (rvu or standard clients or other receivers totaling three)
Watch two shows local via pip that are previously recorded as well.

 

I can attest to the fact that you're statement is 100% correct. That's all I can say.

 

I can understand these explanations, but for someone like myself who is down to 13 series links, has almost 80% free space, never has more than 1 program recording at a time, doesn't use VOD, doesn't use PIP, and has only 1 MRV stream going from time to time; what can you really say... While there's many tasks happening behind the scenes on my HR34, my box has probably turned into the definition of under utilized and still shows the same performance problems.

It used to be my "powerhouse" DVR and I consistently did many of the things inkahauts listed at the same time. It was never screaming fast, but it did perform better back then (even under a larger "load").

 

The HR34 is not a good genie. I don't think there's much else to say really IMHO.