Question for those with working Avermedia A180

[wazkaren]

I have my Avermedia A180 mostly working with 3.0.11 now but I still have "glitches" in every recording. I'm certain the glitches are in the recording, not the playback. Sometimes it skips, sometimes I get some pixelation. I'll get anywhere between 5 to 10 glitches in an hour recording. It's watchable but very annoying. For those that have A180's do you see glitches? How often? I've done everything I can think of to speed up my PC so I'm wondering if it could be a problem with Sage.

Thanks,
Greg

[mikejaner]

I see about the same frequency of glitches every hour. I just chalked it up to ongoing development of HD with SageTV, cause every release of the Beta gets better and better with these cards.

[wazkaren]

Thanks, that's what I was looking for. If I have some idea that it's caused by the beta then I'm fine with it. But knowing this stops me from banging my head trying to figure out what's wrong with my PC.

I see in your signature that you've got quite a few encoders. I was wondering if I had too much going on with my 3 hauppauge and 1 A180. I've It looks like you've got even more data going to the harddrive then me, so I think I'm OK in that regard.

Thanks,
Greg

[Fluffdaddy]

Originally Posted by wazkaren

I see in your signature that you've got quite a few encoders. I was wondering if I had too much going on with my 3 hauppauge and 1 A180. I've It looks like you've got even more data going to the harddrive then me, so I think I'm OK in that regard.

Thanks,
Greg

I was wondering the same. I have 2 Hauppauge 250 and 2 AverMedia A180, with a ATI 9800pro AMD 2600+ XP 1.5 gig.ram
and sometimes my system just seems to be gasping for air. Maybe I'm expecting to much of the old girl. Maybe a AMD 3000 64 cpu or more ram is in order.........I just don't know at this point.
Oh as a sidenote: I'm also using Comskip. I'm sure this is taxing my poor AMD 2600+ to no end


btw: I have the same "glitches" in most recording also. Happy to read it's not just me.

[mikejaner]

I have three hard drives for shows, so usually if I am using all of my four tuners at the same time, there is really only one hard drive handling more than one stream. I had three Hauppauge 150MCE's in the system, but ran out of PCI slots when I added the dual A180's. Having a SageTV server doing all the tuners and having multiple hard drives seems to be a better setup than people using only one box. I am not dealing with any decoding or ui on the server, therefore reducing a huge load on the system IMHO.

[wazkaren]

Originally Posted by mikejaner

Having a SageTV server doing all the tuners and having multiple hard drives seems to be a better setup than people using only one box.

I had the same thought so this past weekend I bought a SATA 150 drive to add to my Sage server. Now I have one system drive, an IDE drive dedicated to Sage (contected to a different IDE controller from the system drive) and my new SATA which is also dedicated to Sage. Both Sage drives use 64K clusters. And earlier in the week I added more memory. And although the system is quicker now I'm not sure I see any reduction in glitches.

Greg

[ripple]

Originally Posted by wazkaren

For those that have A180's do you see glitches? How often?

I have 3 PVR-250's and an A180 and I don't see any pixellation or skips using a P3 2.2GHz and ATI 9200. I have had one show recorded that seemed to be confused about playback, but all the others played back fine. The messed-up one showed 0:00:00 length and yet played for 15 minutes (never showing progress) and when I tried to skip forward it went back to the beginning and wouldn't play anymore.

Maybe pixellation/skipping is a signal strength issue. My OTA antenna feed goes into both my HDTV and my A180, but even though my HTDV tuner can display 5 local HD channels, my A180 can only tune 4 of them. From playing with the antenna it appears that the A180 requires a stronger signal to work properly. I have very strong signals on the 4 working digital channels so maybe that is why I don't see any glitches - maybe your signal is borderline for the A180's needs (that's what pixellation implies to me...).

My biggest gripe with 3.0.x is that my A180 won't tune after resuming from standby. I'm sure it's probably an AverMedia driver limitation, but I really don't want my system running 24x7.

Kevin

[jsidlosky]

What % signal strength do you need for your A180 to work properly?

With my ATI HDTV Wonder, At 45% signal strength, it works great.

[mkanet]

This isn't an issue with Avertmedia A180 specifically.

I get the same glitches as well with my Fusion 5 cards (IE, pixelation; sometimes with a weird squreech sound; once every minute to 5 minutes); especially when I am recording 2 HD shows. I could have sworn I didnt have these glitches before with the earlier releases of the sageTV software (when I used to manually change to "NumBuffers=64".

Whatever it is, it doesnt appear to be related to signal strength. My theory is that SageTV might be recording/playback from the disk too aggressively; using more resources than needed.

[ripple]

Originally Posted by jsidlosky

What % signal strength do you need for your A180 to work properly?
With my ATI HDTV Wonder, At 45% signal strength, it works great.

Where do you read the signal strength?

Originally Posted by mkanet

Whatever it is, it doesnt appear to be related to signal strength.

You're probably right, I was just throwing out some ideas. I guess it would be easy to determine if it was a signal issue vs a playback issue by replaying the clip. If the glitches were part of the recording due to a signal issue I would expect to see the glitches at the same place when you play it back. If it is a resource issue during playback I'd expect the glitches to show up at different spots each time the clip is played.

[mkanet]

I see the glitches happen in the same places of the recording when playing back. I attribute this to a resource bottleneck somewhere in my case. I noticed that the disk I record to is extremely defragmented (even though using 64K clusters). I just wiped my disk clean to see if this problem disapears.

Originally Posted by ripple

You're probably right, I was just throwing out some ideas. I guess it would be easy to determine if it was a signal issue vs a playback issue by replaying the clip. If the glitches were part of the recording due to a signal issue I would expect to see the glitches at the same place when you play it back. If it is a resource issue during playback I'd expect the glitches to show up at different spots each time the clip is played.

[jsidlosky]

I never had any glitches like this with the ATI HDTV Wonder.

Maybe the AverMedia isn't doing enough on-card buffering.

[wazkaren]

Originally Posted by mkanet

I see the glitches happen in the same places of the recording when playing back. I attribute this to a resource bottleneck somewhere in my case. I noticed that the disk I record to is extremely defragmented (even though using 64K clusters). I just wiped my disk clean to see if this problem disapears.

Same here. My disk was very fragmented. I just defraged my video disk earlier this week and added the second blank SATA drive. But I still had glitches last night. I have not done a good test yet but the glitches seem to get worse when my Hauppauges are recording at the same time. The Hauppauge recordings never glitch tho, only the A180 stuff. So I too believe it a resourse issue of some sort in Sage. Although I don't know how to prove it.

Greg

[jkoutrouba]

Interesting. I always thought it was a reception issue. I have the same problem, though.


-JK

[wazkaren]

Originally Posted by jkoutrouba

Interesting. I always thought it was a reception issue. I have the same problem, though.


-JK

In my case I don't believe it's a reception problem. I do have one channel that shows 100% in the Avermedia application. Every few minutes or so I can see the signal meter drop to 25% and I lose picture (still haven't figured what happening with this channel since the tower is in the same location as all the other OTA channels I get without problem). This is definately some sort of signal problem and is clearly not a Sage problem. The problem I'm talking about here is on my other 3 OTA channels where I never see anything but solid 100% signal strength in the Avermedia application. Since I can't run the Avermedia app (with the signal meter) and Sage at the same time I can't prove that it's a Sage problem but it sure seems like it.

Greg

[mikejaner]

Has anybody submitted this as a potential bug for this release?

Watching TV again last night, I did go back and verify where the screen locked for a split second, that it is in the stream, cause it locks at the same frame everytime, just like mkanet was saying.

[wazkaren]

Originally Posted by mikejaner

Has anybody submitted this as a potential bug for this release?

I had not submitted it yet since I didn't know if I was the only one with the problem. But now I will submit it.

Greg

[mkanet]

I wiped my recording drive clean. No other active processes running in the background. I am still getting the this intermittent pixelating/brief pausing with 2 ATSC recordings at a time (especially when recording along with my Hauppuage analog capture).

I am certain that this machine and hardware configuration didnt have this problem before. It's pretty easy to get fooled into thinking its signal level. I tripled checked and my signal is rock solid on all digital channels.

I'm hoping one of you will submit this bug. I'm sure the developers are tired if getting bug reports from me :-)

[wazkaren]

I submitted the problem.

Greg

[wazkaren]

I got a response back from Sage support asking if I have the same problem with files recorded using the AverMedia application. I'm planning to test that out tonight. Has anyone else tried recording from their A180 with the Avermedia app?

Greg