Newbie Questions

[Paco]

Howdy.

I am new to the DIY PVR scene, but not new to computers. I recently switched from Direct TV (used their TIVO receiver) to local (digital) cable, and thought I would give SageTV a try (GBPVR was an exercise in total frustration.) I am having a few minor problems and thought I would ask in this forum as I am trying out the new beta.

I have set up a Dell Gx240 as the main box (no server enabled yet). I am runnning W2K (plain install,) and no anti-virus software. The box has 1GB of RAM, a 10 GB system drive, a 500GB capture drive, and I am outputting to a 27" tv via a fx5200 over composite. I am using a Hauppauge PVR 250 and its remote to control sage, and controlling the cable company's Motorolla DCT700 STB via a usb-uirt.

I have sage configured to use overlay, cyberlink video and audio decoders and renderers, and 3d acceleration turned off. I am recording the incoming composite signal at the DVD standard setting (3.2Gb/Hr).

My problem is that I am seeing intermittent minor stuttering during playback of recorded video, and major stuttering when trying to watch a DVD (from a DVD drive - not ripped to the HD). I have tried changing the video decoders, and cyberlink seems to be better than the ones that came with sagetv, but I am still seeing stuttering. The DVD playback bugs me the most. I can probably live with the intermittent stuttering of recorded shows.

Any ideas? I thought My setup would be plenty for just recording SD tv and outputting it to a single tv. By the way, DVD playback works fine through PowerDVD.

Should I start over and go to the latest non-beta software, or what?

Thanks in advance for any input.

[Opus4]

One thing to check for stutter on the recordings is to make sure the drive used for the recordings was formatted using 64K clusters. This wouldn't have anything to do with DVD drive playback, though.

- Andy

[Paco]

Thanks for the reply.

Yeah, I pretty much followed all of the recommendations I could glean from the forums. I am running 800x600 resolution, 64K clusters, & recommended Nvidia video drivers. I also double checked to see that the ide channels were set to DMA transfer mode (both HD are running UDMA.) Both Hard Drives are on IDE channel 1, the DVD is on channel 2. I tried to make this as simple as possible, and then try to work up from there, but this DVD playback thing is frustrating.

[paulbeers]

You will have to forgive me but what are the specs of the box? I know its a Dell Gx240, but what is in a Dell Gx240? Ram? Proc?

[Paco]

The Dell Optiplex Gx240 has an intel 845 chipset, Pentium 4 1.7 Ghz. (256k cache) processor, and supports PC133 SDRAM. Not the fastest thing on the block, but the only other system I have is a P3 1Ghz. i815 system. I put 1GB of SDRAM in it, and am running W2K to free up as much processor and memory as possible.

[Paco]

Well, I went through the entire system again, and somehow missed that the secondary IDE channel device 0 was set to PIO only. The device 1 was set to DMA, but I have nothing on device 1. The DVD drive is on device 0, so I reset it to DMA, and DVD playback works fine now. Tack this one up to "user error" - or something weird going on in my system. Thanks for the input.

The only other issues I have seen with the beta is that the guide data is sometimes wrong (which probably has nothing to do with SageTV,) and a weird quirk with skipping ahead on recordings with the hauppauge 34 button remote (sometimes it skips way ahead with one press of the button.) I have also noticed that my STB (DCT700) sometimes registers keystrokes to change a channel when it not supposed to, and once in a while it goes to the wrong channel (like going to channel 21 when asked to go to channel 210.) I have the usb-uirt pointed directly at the STB, and both are on the floor behind my entertainment center (to avoid any interference.) I can usually fix this by telling sagetv to go to the wrong channel (21) and then teling it to go to the right channel (210). The numbers appear just fine on the sagetv interface, but somehow do not always get transmitted correctly through the usb-uirt to the STB.