SABnzbd Forums

Soooo, I'm running sabnzbd+ 0.4.12 on my media server, which is also my HTPC, running a pretty recent release of XBMC (whatever the latest is that they're advertising on the site).

Whenever sabnzbd finishes downloading something and starts extracting (I'm assuming), if I'm playing a video on XBMC, the video freezes, but the audio continues playing, and the only way I can stop it is by exiting XBMC (like, end task exit).

I haven't noticed any ridiculous amounts of cpu or memory usage when this happens, but I usually can't get task manager open until shortly after it starts happening, so I can't be sure.

Any thoughts?

If not, I'll probably head over to the xbmc forums and ask them.

(also, sabnzbd 0.5.0 beta1 isn't really an option, as I had a few problems with it not downloading stuff it should have been downloading, etc, so I'd like to hold off on upgrading)

(oh yeah, running Windows 7. 3.0ghz dual-core something or another. 3GB of ram. Running xbmc in directx)

par2 and unrar use a lot of CPU time and both are quite capable of
saturating the disk channel.
We're already giving lower CPU priority to these utilities,
but under Windows you cannot influence disk priorities.

There's nothing we can do about this.
Any other Usenet downloader will have the same problem.

If it's a disk priority issue, would it help if I had it extract the files to a physical drive other than the one from which I'm watching videos?

That is, I've got my TV shows on drive K:

When SABnzbd extracts new tv shows to drive K, it's "saturating the disk channel". If I have it extract new shows to another drive, like D or E, would the same thing still probably happen?


/edit: Also, since you seemed a little defensive, I just wanted to point out that I wasn't complaining at all. SABnzbd is pretty much the only reason I'm able to deal with using newsgroups. You guys rock. It's a fantastic program. I just wondered if there was a setting or something I could change to fix the issue.

I'm not offended at all.
It frustrating for us to that we cannot control the behavior
of par2 and unrar.
Of course, people keep complaining about it, and with good reason.
But it's beyond our control.

A two drive system is definitely beneficial.
Actually, the worst offender is par2 doing repairs.
So you may want to separate the "temporary download folder" from the folders you watch your videos on.
So your "working" drive should be one and video watching and unpacking should be the other.
I think watching and unpacking should mix.
But you'll have to experiment a bit.

A future 0.5.x release will have support for low priority hard drive usage in windows vista and windows 7.

I have most of the code ready for a while, just didn't include it in the 0.5.0 release as we were (or should have been) in a feature freeze.

That'd be super.