Re: Recording "hitches"... this is my only thing I can think of!

[GoldenTiger]

I posted a thread describing recording "hitches" where the picture would garble along with the audio very slightly, for about 1/3-/12 a second. I recently realized that the picture isn't as good as it used to be, and was wondering... could these issues be caused by an insufficient signal strength? The image has gotten noisier on the main TV since my TV tuner and a secondary bedroom TV were added. Do you guys think that a Motorola Signal Booster would improve matters for me?

[stevech]

more splitters for more TVs and tuners = less signal. Each 2-way splitter halves the signal power per port.

You can offset this to an extent by putting a high quality (not cheap) cable TV amplifier in - at the closest point to where the cable enters your home. If you have a devices that transmits a signal onto the cable like a cable modem or some set-top-boxes, put that ahead (upstream) of the amplifier. There are "bi-directional" amplifiers but all I've seen pass but don't amplify the reverse direction signal.

Amplifiers add noise. Cheap ones add a LOT of noise. I'd spend US$40 or more to get one from a reputable company rather than the corner Radio Shack or WallMart.

That said, I do have a couple of channels which look very noisy on playback. They are less but noticeably noisy on the TV itself. I think the MPEG encoder highlights noise. But I've never seen the problem you describe - 1/2 second garbled video/audio. Of course, you can record from a video source that is noise free and see if you eliminate the "hitches".

[GoldenTiger]

Grasping at straws, what might be causing it? The picture isn't ATROCIOUSLY snowy, but it does have a small amount of obvious snow/noise. Also, do you need to have the WinTV2000 app installed even if you're using SageTV for encoding to work properly? Their support site claims that, but I don't know if that's supposedly for recording with their PVR software or for it to work with any program.

EDIT: Mods, I completely understand if you feel I should take this to another forum related to HTPC's since it isn't directly Sage-related .

[AboveUnrefined]

You don't need to install the Wintv2000 app... subtle snow shouldn't be garbling everything up either - could you post your hardware specs on the machine that's having the problem?

[GoldenTiger]

This is mostly a copy-paste from my other post, but it's not like they've changed :

Shuttle XPC SN25P Small-Form-Factor chasis/propietary FN25 nforce4-ultra chipset motherboard/PSU
Athlon 64 X2 3800+ dual-core CPU
eVGA Nvidia 7800GT 256mb videocard (pci-express)
2GB dual-channel RAM Crucial
300gb Maxtor MaxLine III 7200RPM 16mb Cache 7L300S0 native SATA with NCQ model HDD
DVD burner NEC 3540A
1680x1050 widescreen Dell 2005FPW 20" LCD monitor
Hauppauge WinTV PVR-USB2 external TV tuner hooked into a USB2.0 port directly, not a USB hub.
Dell 2005FPW 20" Widescreen LCD Monitor 1680x1050 resolution

DRIVERS: 6.70 chipset SMbus and ethernet; NO nforce ide driver, no NAM, 82.12 forceware for video card. Windows XP SP2. DirectX 9.0c with 9.0b quartz.dll as I was told it was good to help stop stuttering playback.

Recordings are being made to a 64k cluster partition.

Thanks!

[GoldenTiger]

Bah, restored the 9.0c Quartz.dll without luck, still have the issues with new recordings as well .

[GoldenTiger]

That was the right track, in a way. It had to do with the encoding though, not the decoding. When changing the decoders with GraphEdit, I managed to find the control panel for the Hauppauge TV Encoder settings finally, whichi were not accessible from anywhere else I had found. I then google'd about a setting and bumped into a thread on videohelp about someone having the exact issues I was having, with the WinTV PVR250 instead of the USB2. However, as you may or may not know, they are both the exact same thing, just different formfactors (same chipset, basically the same drivers, etc.). So, this person with the same issues... he had figured out that if he changed the bitrate of the audio in the properties sheet to 44.1khz instead of 48khz, and used Constant Bit Rate encoding, the problems cleared up. I tried the same thing, and then made a custom SageTV quality to use those settings, and voila! No more artifacting! Posting this mainly for posterity for anyone else who buys the unit I have and encounters the issue (WinTV PVR-USB2), hopefully in the future it will help someone out .