Moving recordings to PC and hard drive slow to read files

hello,

I have seemed to have this issue a few times now where I move over some recordings from my NAS to my computer's hard drive. afterwards its seems like the folder on the hard drive on the pc is slow to read and load any recordings. I have noticed that it tends to do this when I have a folder with alot of recordings from one particular show.

For example, i moved over my mlb baseball folder which has about 55 recordings to my PC. the total of this folder for example is about 520 GB. however the computer's hard drive has over 4 TB of space so I dont understand why the folder is reading and loading everything so slow.

Any help would be welcomed. hope this makes sense.

It’s quite possible Windows is scanning the files to get metadata from them, and show those details in a media view. If you change the folder view to just list or something other than media, does the problem go away?

Nope it gets worse and the green bar just takes forever to finish loading. I been trying to look online for possible solutions to this and I see so many tricks. Maybe I need a faster hard drive not sure. I know it did this same thing with my simpsons recordings that I have going for the longest time. I ended up just deleting everything. I was just frustrated.

If it's a Windows PC, it may be related to this issue - TVE Beta: Recordings causing problems with Windows Explorer

If I recall, my workaround is to make sure that Duration is not displayed as a column in Windows Explorer.

I tried that and no luck as of now. It seems it's an issue with FS1 and ESPN recordings for me.

One person reported that changing the file name from .mpg to .ts fixes this. Can you try that and see if there is any difference?

What do you mean.
Slow viewing the files with Windows Explorer?
Slow starting to play the recording in Channels?
Are all the problem files from TVE recordings?
What does a problem file look like when you open it with MediaInfo
Can you copy and paste the MediaInfo text view here.

If you right click one of the files in Windows Explorer, choose Properties and view the Details tab, does it look like this where the Length is 0 and the Frame rate is missing?
Capture2

yes to all of those three scenarios you mentioned. and i can't do the right click on a file because when i pick it the window just freezes up on me and nothing happens.

That's the same issue discussed in the other thread you posted in.
If you wait long enough after right clicking the file you'll be able to select Properties, or you can select Properties from the Windows Explorer menu.
Appears something in some TVE streams is setting the Frame rate to 48,000 Frames per second and when Windows sees that it's trying to calculate the Length of the video using that value.
Here's how it looks with one of my problem files.
Capture3
Here's how it should look
Capture4
I'm surprised none of the devs have a Win 10 PC or aren't able to duplicate it.

1 Like

alright after 13 mins of waiting for the right click menu to show up and then waiting another 5-6 mintues for the dialog box to appear. it took another 3-4 mins to show the details tab but here it is. i'm guessing it is taking longer because these are 4 hour recordings but the data rate is not showing just like you said.

That doesn't help.
Appears windows id's the files as multimedia (video/audio) and tries to parse it.

yea. that is the same issue i have, trying to right click, or load, the raw files form Channels causes Win explorer to lock up, eventually responds.

Are you accessing these files on the local computer they are made by with Channels?

I am accesing the Channels TV folder via Network share...so I only concluclded it was something in how the Linux OS file permissions work when Channels writes the files/folders. If i copy the files to my local windows computer, they work just fine with no Explorer isses

Thanks for posting this. I see a similar thing when just moving a single recorded show to the HDD where I store shows I want to keep. Or even just try to rename the file. It locks Windows Explorer forever [forever = 30 minutes +].

I had convinced myself this was due to the target HDD being an SMR-type drive (I record to an SSD) and was planning to replace it to get some performance back.

I'll put that plan on hold now, save the money, and wait for a solution from the Channels team.

Edit [36 minutes later, which is how long it took to display properties and switch to the details tab]: I too see the frame rate property being set very high and length set to zero:
image

You wouldn't by any chance have found a tool that can change the frame rate property to something more realistic?

No. Only way I can think of would be to remux each recording file.

I would think someone familiar enough with ffmpeg could come up with a way to remux them into a transport stream with the PCR (that's missing) intact.

Without the PCR and a sync offest between the video and audio, you would have A/V sync issues on playback.

A couple recordings I've looked at (from ESPN and Discovery) use the following audio

Audio
ID              : 257 (0x101)
Menu ID         : 1 (0x1)
Format          : AAC LC SBR
Format/Info     : Advanced Audio Codec Low Complexity with Spectral Band Replication
Commercial name : HE-AAC
Format version  : Version 4
Format settings : Implicit
Muxing mode     : ADTS
Bit rate mode   : Variable
Channel(s)      : 2 channels
Channel layout  : L R
Sampling rate   : 48.0 kHz

and of course each recording will have different sync offsets

Delay relative to video : -33 ms

1 Like

Try remuxing the files per TVE Beta: Recordings causing problems with Windows Explorer

Hopefully the devs can come up with a way to store the problem TVE recordings like this.

1 Like