Corrupt Files

[mkelly4ca]

I've frequently been getting bad recordings. Symptoms vary a bit, but this is typical:

The time marker will move a lot faster than real time. For example, in a 30 minute show, the marker will be at the end of the show within 10 minutes. I'll start playing the show at the beginning, and a few minutes into it it will stop and pop up the "Delete now?" dialog. The marker will be at the end of the show. I can answer the dialog (no), go back into it, watch now, it will be paused where it stopped, the marker will be at the end, I press Play and it continues playing normally. The marker will then jump around, sometimes showing negative numbers. I can fast forward (using smooth forward with the MVP), but if I go faster than 4x it will get 'stuck' or jump around and I'll have to start over from the beginning to fix it. Symptoms are similar when watching on my PC - I don't have the smooth ff, but if I click to jump ahead or behind it puts the marker at zero and continues playing from the same position.

ShowAnalyzer often will hang processing these bad files. BTW, DirMon only runs in the middle of the night, and doesn't process files if the drive is being written to.

Another symptom of possibly the same problem is that it will sometimes cut out about a second of the recording. This is in the recording - I see the same hiccup if I watch the file with WMP. The file may seem ok other than that. Not sure if this is caused by the same problem, but it did seem to start doing that shortly before I started seeing the other problems.

I think this started with Sage 4.1.3, but I can't be sure.

VideoReDo has been able to fix all of the files I've tried with its Quick Steam Fix tool - it typically reports between 5 and 40 "Video resync frames removed", and often some "Audio resync frames removed" and/or "Audio frame errors".

Bad files have been recorded to at least three different hard drives, with all four tuners on the two cards (two PVR-500's), at Good quality and at DVD Standard quality.

Sage Support says it's either a driver or hardware issue.

I was using 2.0.35.23258. I had already uninstalled the cards (not physically), removed all trace of the drivers from the system, including going through the registry and deleting everything that HCWCLEAR.EXE didn't, then reinstalled from the CD. I also (accidentally) started over with a new wiz.bin.

I updated to the latest drivers, which didn't make any difference. I then rolled back to the 23070 drivers to fix the audio distortion issue, and I'm still getting corrupt files (although at least now the audio is fixed).

The frequency of corrupted files seems to have increased over time, which does support the theory of hardware failure. Although both cards failing in the same way at the same time seems pretty unlikely.

I can't afford to run out and buy new hardware, especially to find that it doesn't solve the problem. I'm pretty frustrated.

[gplasky]

Pull one card out and run your system with one card for a few days and look for corrupt recordings. If none, replace it with other card. Keep drivers the same. You should at least be able to narrow down which card is the issue. Then return the card to the vendor.

Gerry

[mkelly4ca]

Thanks, but both cards have produced corrupt files.

[gplasky]

Are they showing up on one particular drive or are all drives getting corrupt files?

Gerry

[mkelly4ca]

Bad files have been recorded to at least three different hard drives, with all four tuners on the two cards (two PVR-500's), at Good quality and at DVD Standard quality.