Hi,

I keep on having random freezes with iPi Recorder 2, and a setup made up of 4 PS Eye cameras. When starting recording the animation, the fans of my computer sometimes get very loud, and I know iPi Recorder is freezing. It rarely freezes during a recording that has started well. It freezes at the beginning, or never freezes.

The support told me to disable anti-virus software and Windows Indexing Services. It helped somehow, but I keep on having these freezes.

Does anyone have the same problem maybe? Or did anyone solve this problem already?

In the trace of iPi Recorder 2, I can see quite a lot of lines like:


I have a Windows 8 64 bits / SSD / 16 GB RAM i7 3.6 GHz box. No particular software installed, nothing running in background. Active USB2 and USB3 cables, from different manufacturers. Clean install, all drivers up-to-date...

I downgraded the BIOS this morning, which was a beta BIOS, but it had no effect: I still experience these freezes.

Another question maybe: is there anyone here using Windows 8x64 without any problem?

OK, I ordered this USB 3.0 adapter today:

http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA_new/RocketU1144B_app.htm

I'll let you know what happens when I have received it, but hopefully this is the problem.

I made tests with cheap USB 2.0 and 3.0 adapters, but none of them was able to cope with a PS Eye at 640x480@60FPS.

We have recently tested recording on Windows 8. And must admit that there is the freezing issue releated to using PS Moves (with Motion in Joy drivers). It does not seem to depend on the number and type of cameras used, or USB controllers involved. However, this issue does not appear stable at all times.
We have not yet detected the root cause of this issue, and will continue to investigate it.

This is not 100% "scientific", but I have noticed motion joy drivers make the situation worse on my computer: iPi Recorder freezes much more. But it freezes as well without them. I have also noticed PS Eye cameras are sometimes not recognized at boot.

What typical throughput does iPi Recorder have with 4 PS Eye cameras? I have noticed huge variations, from 2.7MB/s to 10 times more. A fresh restart of iPi Recorder very often yields to a lower throughput for a while. I don't know if this throughput is effective, or if the reporting is not 100% correct.

I still await my new USB board, and I'll try upgrading the firmware of the PS Eye cameras. Otherwise I think I'll install Windows 7, my system is unfortunately not usable like this...

Hello,

First I would like to say that you did a really great job with this software. It really helped me a lot for my project. I've had the same problem with windows 8 64 bits since I added ps moves to my system. It is very annoying cause I have to reinitialize everything many times which is very time-consuming. Have you already found at least a temporary fix for this issue ?

Thanks.

Hi again,

I've been working on this issue today and I think I found a fix. At least I can record videos without getting freezes. My system is composed of 3 ps moves and 2 xtion pro cameras and I use windows 8 64 bits. Here's what I do to prevent freezes :
- open ipi recorder
- setup things as usual
- the first time you want to record a video disable compression for depth and color and record a little video of less than 1 second. It seems to stabilize things.
- Reenable compression and record your video as usual.

When you leave ipi recorder running without using it for some time, it's a idea to record a quick video of less than 1 second again. It works for me anyway.

If you get a freeze the first time you use ipi recorder after a fresh reboot, just try again. It seems that is the first video that causes trouble.

Ciao.

Hi everybody,

Juste in case someone faces the same problem, here are a bunch of things I did in order to get a 99% stable system. I'm not sure which one of these changes are most relevant (some of them are not necessary, for sure), but I least it works... (4 PS Eye cams and 2 PS Move)

- Downgrade OS from Windows 8 x64 to Windows 7 x64 (with ALL optimized drivers).
- Downgrade BIOS to latest stable version (had a beta version installed).
- Upgarde firmware of my Samsung SSD, and run optimization stuff (OS + disk) found in their "SSD Magician" Utility.
- Use USB 2.0 extension cables only (I have USB 3.0 cables as well).
- Plug exclusively all 4 cameras on the motherboard USB 2.0 and 3.0 connectors.
- Plug ANY other USB adapter (network, bluetooth, keyboard and mouse...) to 2 PCI USB 2.0 adapter cards.

I STILL have problems, but less frequent. I'm pretty sure this has to do with the USB throughput my motherboard cannot sustain. I await another USB PCI card, with 4 controllers.

I'm not sure it has to do with usb throughput because I was getting freezes when I was using only one xtion camera + 1 ps move. But I'm pretty sure I wasn't getting all those freezes before I added ps moves to my system. Furthermore ipi recorder doesn't freeze before hitting record even if everything is already working (cameras and ps moves). The only difference is that the system is more stressed ( HDD activity + cpu cycles used to compress streams). Anyway I think this problem should be addressed quickly because a record session can become very frustrating if you get too many freezes. Hopefully I found a way to get a system stable enough to work otherwise I would have had to get windows 7...

Now that my system is super-stable, even with 6 cams now, here are a few more tips: again, this is not supposed to be absolutely necessary, but this is what I did and it worked. It might help you, or give you ideas...

- Run all cams from PCI-e cards having a Renesas Electronics USB 3.0 chip. The biggest I have is a four ports one (four chips as well), model EX-11494. Not cheap, but powerful. I have two other card, with 2 ports, and a single chip.
- All the cards are connected to the power supply directly.
- Run all other USB peripheral (WLAN, keyboard and mouse, except bluetooth) from these PCI-e cards as well.

During recording, I reach sometimes 100MB/s. Woof... :)