PVR500 stutter / lockup problems

[muzzynat]

Hi all,

I've looked over the threads trying to find a problem like mine, but I haven't had much luck. If I'm duplicating another thread, please let me know.

My sage tv seems to be horably unstable, so much so that many times I have considered scrapping the entire project. If I manage to get the box stable, and recording shows for 1 or maybe 2 days it will start to have stutter in the playback, not just around when recordings stop and start, but randomly. Eventually the entire system will freeze during playback, and its an complete system freeze, cntl-alt-del has no effect on it. I've tried using a diffrent video card, diffrent decoder, completely reformating and reinstallying, and still I find myself with the same problem. I've had task manager open as the program freezes, and ram and cpu usage both seem to be pretty low.

The system consists of: (I can get more exact if nessisary, but I'm posting from another part of the house)
A Chaintech mATX nForce 2 mobo
AMD athlon 2100+
512mb ram (generic)
ATI Radeon 9600
PVR-500
Western digital 120 gb hd
a liteon dvd drive
a plextor dual layer burner (which i haven't even played around with yet )
a Zalman 400w stealth powersupply
and its all housed in a coolermaster ACTs home theater/desk top case

I have heard about heat issues with other capture cards, Is it possible that my troubles are heat related?

any help/recomendations are greatly appreciated

(Post edited to remove card confustion, 3-13-05)

[ToxMox]

What are all of your Audio and Video settings in the Detailed Setup?
Which tuner card are you using? You subject line says PVR500 and your post says PVR300 which doesn't even exist.

[muzzynat]

The card is a PVR-500, I had heard about a diffrent card (i thought that they said pvr-300, but i must be mistaken), I edited the original post to reflect it. Audio settings are all whatever their default positions were. VIDEO is set to use the NVIDIA decoder, however, I have used the cyberlink decoder. I currently have it set to overlay mode, but unly because I was curious to see if that would help the situation (It didn't). All other video settings are at their default positions.

[ToxMox]

Sounds like you have tried the stuff I'd try. Sorry I don't have any other ideas for you.

[muzzynat]

Thanks for trying, It's nice to have outside help, hopefully I can get this working eventually.

[Toddly]

I feel for you. I had a problem that sounds quite similar but it was on Client playback. You could rule out the heat issue by removing the cover on the case so it would be cooler inside to see if that helps any.

[muzzynat]

I've been running it with the case off abouta week though, but I was thinking Maybe if I put a pci slot blower fan, or maybe modified some ramsinks to fit the tuners it would help, though at this point I seriously doubt that the problem is the tuner heat. And I thought this would be easier than my arcade machine build, LOL.

[something fishy]

A blowhole (in the top if you're using a desktop case) and an 80mm fan aimed at the card will provide the best cooling and I've had good results from just an 80mm fan aimed internally at the card (blowing from the front to the back) even though this doesn't evacuate heat from the case. Others have reported good results from a slot cooler but I've never seen a quiet one.

That said, I don't have a PVR500, but I have a 250 and a 250 (used as an encoder only) in adjacent PCI slots. They do get pretty toasty and make that corner of the box easily the hottest, but I've never had any of the symptoms you describe.

[muzzynat]

I cant really put a blowhole in since it would just suck hot air from, or blow hot air onto my xbox (unless i really rearange my rack), I think I'll try put a slot blower in. I really doubt heat is the issue, but at least I'll be able to cross it off if a blower doesn't improve the situation.

[ported]

Do you have any updates, Muzzynat? I'm having the identical problem. I thought Sage got corrupted, so I did an OS clean format (had to cleanup my codecs anyway) and reinstalled Sage from scratch. It worked for another week, and started doing the exact same thing again. I'm using two PVR-150's with a Celeron 2.4G, 512M, Radeon 9550, Sage 2.2, and Java RT 1.5.0.02.

Once the videos start getting corrupted, they all are like that. If I play them in Sage, they'll completely lockup the GUI after 15-30min. I can play them in WMP (although the momentary stuttering is still there) without lockups, however.

I hope there's a solution to this, because I didn't begin having the problem until after I purchased Sage, and I can't stand MediaPortal or BeyondTV.

[muzzynat]

Having had no luck with the first two mother boards I tried, I decided to use a new mATX semperon(sp? Its early and im lazy :P ) board and processor that I had purchased for a ftp server. So far no lockups on that board, despite its Questionable quality.

For the record, the new working (knock on wood, I've only had it up a week) Mother board is a Mach Speed Venom V2DP mother board, and I'm using the onboard video, since I just want to keep this simple, and it keeps heat down. The proc is a 2.7 ghz Semperon. I got them in a combo deal for 100 bucks at Micro Center.

I have to admitt thatim very disapointed in what seems to be massive incompatability in the PVR 500. maybe I just got a bad board, or maybe not, the whole line of cards seem to have various bugs.

However, I'd like to say this most likely IS NOT a sage issue.

I wish I had better news, but for those suffering the same problem I had, the only real fix I've found is moving to a diffrent motherboard and processor entirely.

P.S. Please DO NOT switch mobos because of this post yet. I've only had the box up a week, and I'd feel terrible if it started crashing, and people had wrongly purchased a new mobo and proc because i jumped the gun. I'll try up date this in like a week. If it goes longer than that, just post something to remind me to update :P

[deliverer]

I have a server that is locking up as well. I'm running a Chaintech CT-7NJS motherboard. Is that the same one you were having issues with? What was the final resolution?

Regards,

Deliverer

[muzzynat]

Sorry to say this, but the only thing that worked for us was to put in a new motherboard. The one I replaced it with was just a generic semperon board (the details are listed in the long post above). It seemed to resolve all the issues we had with the system, though the box and I have since parted ways (its at a friends house now). It seems liek the PVR-500 is just very picky about what it wants to work with.

[TheraEdge]

I had the same problem when I first set up my Sage machine. I was using an ABIT motherboard, and ended up switching to an ASUS A7N8X I think it was...the only reason I can, I think, type it from memory is because it has latley been the most reliable board for any system...I have a version of that particular board in the sage machine I have, my main computer, a friends main computer, and another friend put the same board in 2 of his computers...it has been a great board for all of us, with 0 stability issues...Oh, and it saved my computer a couple of times when it shut itself down because the CPU got to hot when the fan died.

The problem I had, and I think it may be an old, old thread somewhere, was that it would record fine for a while, and after a undetermend amount of time (sometimes one day sometimes one week) it would freak out and lock up...and for some reason in the version of sage I was using, it would always lose track of the recorded shows and usually corrupt the files on the HD enough that the computer didn't think it was formatted anymore. This may have been an issue with crashing in the middle of sage recording in that version though. I suspect it was an issue with being able to read and write the large amounts of data to and from the hard drive at the same time. I may end up finding a limit to how many tuners I can put on this system one day if I try to put 4 or more tuners trying to record to the same drive at the same time. But we will see when that day gets here.

Short story though, is that after I swapped out the motherboard, all problems ceased to be.