Corrupt files with PVR500

[newmedia42]

I'm having a strange problem with the PVR500 - I'm not sure what is the culprit, since quite a bit of my system has changed, but here's the lowdown. Originally I was using the DVico HD tuner and 2 of the Plextor analog inputs, but I recently switch to the HD Homerun and a PVR 500. Now, the HD Homerun (and all HD recording) seem to be working flawlessly, but I've been running into a strange issue with the PVR500. Basically sometimes it seems to be corrupting the mpeg files it creates - for instance, I was watching a South Park that it had recorded, which was supposed to be 30 minutes, but when you watched it the playback looked fine, but the progress bar was jumping at probably 3x speed, so the time would go 0:01, 0:03, 0:05, etc - and if I did the 2:30 jump, it only jumped probably a minute or two into the video. It then didn't record the full 30 minutes, but instead only recorded about 10 minutes of the show. Very strange, so I just sort of chalked it up to the PVR gods, rebooted my machine and set it up to record South Park again - and the SAME problem happened! The really strange thing is that pretty much all the other analog recordings are fine - I haven't had any problems with them. Then, last night I watched Dexter and while it was playing the video just stopped working, I then hit the 10 second fast forward, and it fast forwarded a good 2-3 minutes, I rewound back to where the problem happened, and it happened again exactly as before.

I *suspect* that what's happening is that it's failing on the second tuner on the PVR500 for some reason, and that's why I'm having the problems rarely. Unfortunately I didn't save any of the videos, so I can't check them out, but I'll be saving them when it happens again.

Any thoughts on how to track this down, or has anyone had similar issues?

[Opus4]

Try the registry fix in this topic: (Edit: link removed; see below instead)

- Andy

[Conejo]

I originally found a solution to the hauppauge 150/500 solution back in May of 2006. More recent versions of their driver software may already fix this issue, but there doesn't seem to be any harm in applying the code to the registry.

GBPVR Forum user 'DDRAWLEY' posted a helpful option for people who update or HCLEAR their systems and forget to re-add the reg entries.

"For those less technical you can copy the text below (marked in red) into a notepad file. Name the file something like timeline.reg and then execute it.
YOU NEED TO REBOOT AFTER ADDING THESE REGISTRY SETTINGS"

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\hcwPP2\DriverData]
"HcwTimeStampIssue1"=dword:00000001
"HcwTimeStampIssue2"=dword:00000000

More information can be found here: GBPVR Wiki
By clicking the above link you will be leaving our known universe and heading off into a possible parallel universe where... well, you know.

[newmedia42]

Cool - thanks! I checked in my registry and those entries were nowhere to be found, so I've added them and rebooted - I'll make sure to update this thread if the problem persists...

BTW; I'm running the latest drivers from Hauppauges site, which is v3.4D1 according to their site.

[coolpup32]

I had this problem also, where the timebar would lose time... So at, what sage thought was the end of the show, it would stop with plenty of time left of video. If I still had the stop diag up i could press play and it would resume, but if you press ff or rw it would go back to where sage thought it ended.

to make a long story short opus' / Conejo's fix worked good for me

[wrems]

If you get another bad video file run it through VideoRedo Quick Stream Fix... That'll at least recover your recorded shows until you can track down the culprit. My culprit turned out to be heavy cpu load while recording. The high cpu usage contributed to dropping frames and messing up the recordings. VRD does a beautiful job fixing them.