studdering, jittering, encoding?, playback?, PVR250/350

[Humanzee]

Ok, I have been dealing with this for too long. This may have been covered in the past but i couldn't find it with all the other 350 threads out there.

I keep getting recordings with some sort of sync problem or encoding problem. On the affected files the video frame jumps (as in skipping ahead a few frames) about once a second. The audio playback is largely uneffected except for an occational chirp, that sounds like a bad mp3 file. Anyway, I can't figure this out. I get these problems on files recorded on both the pvr250 and pvr350. But not on every file, and not only on recordings made at any certain time or any certain channel. It seems to be completely random.

I have 2 Western Digital 250gb HDD's for storage. Both are formated with 64k clusters, both are defragmented nightly. The operating system and paging file are on a seperate 40gb drive, they get defragmented every 3rd day. I have all the latest drivers that I can find for my chipset etc.

Could heat be a factor?
It's been in the mid 80's the last couple of days in this room. Today, I stuck some baffling in my case to increase air flow over the pvr350 just in case it is a playback issue. I think its an encoding problem however, as I can't play the affected files in windows media player at all, or at least it seems to freeze up the machine when I try. This might be a ram issue though on larger files. I dont know if WM tries to load the whole mpg file before playback starts

Could I need more RAM?
While Sage is simultaniously recording and playing back Task Manager shows that it is using about 100 megs of ram and about 1% of cpu time.
I chose the 350 originally because of the hardware only decoding option. Of course both TV cards encode on the hardware so there shouldn't be (and isn't) much cpu use. The page file reads 224mb used, which appears to be about 25% of its capacity.

Could Comskip be creating these issues if it is running while I am recording?
I still get this problem when comskip is running in "play nice" mode. It is set to only run while sage is sleeping.

Might there be a registry setting for these hauppauge cards that needs tweaking?

Should I shut up and wait for 3.0 and hope everything gets fixed?

Thanks in advance, and see my configuration below..

[Stuntman]

I'm seeing something similiar now.. did you ever figure this one out?

[Humanzee]

Yes, this went away when stopped using the 350's decoder chip for output. I think it was a problem when i was watching a recording and encoding a program at the same time on the 350.

Anyway, I wanted to be able to show some pictures and video from a vacation to some friend at a party and the 350 wouldn't cut it, so I gave up and I bought more ram, an nVidia 6600 GT and the pure video codec. It looks pretty darn good when compaired to the 350, and now no EOF problem, I can finally play dvd's, other video formats, and surf the web.

If you go this route, make sure you have your tv set as the primary monitor, and update all the firmware for your computer hardware. It took me a while to get everything running smoothly with Direct X and 3d acceloration. But all seems good now. FSE is still a tricky beast though. Over all I am much more happy with sage now, no significant stuttering since I made this change. If any, I'm certain that it is a rendering issue not a encoding issue. My system is a little on the slow side for software decoding but it works well for now.

Good luck.