HD-PVR lock-up roll call

[Opus4]

I've switched my STBs to output only 1080i now instead of multiple resolutions. I haven't had a lock in several days now. It may just be luck/coincidence & another lock will soon hit me, but if your STB isn't set for only 1 resolution, you could try that. Of course, SD recordeding are now full HD size.

- Andy

[Clift]

Originally Posted by royhuang

It probably is SageTV as my HDHR tuners + HD-PVR work fine but my internal AverMedia M792 tuner does stutter a little.

Some things to check though: (1) have you defragmented the partition of the HD where the videos are recorded? (2) did you try the lowest recording quality settings for the HD-PVR to reduce the throughput? (<--I'm trying this now to see if I can solve my internal tuner video stutter) (3) Is your CPU/HD fast enough to handle high-def video? Do you have a HDHR to see whether the HD channel will play via VLC player?

My PC is fast enough to handle H.264 with DXVA but not without. I'm having bit better luck now using the the Sage MPEG4 decoder instead of directshow and using overlay. Oh and I have an HDHR that works just fine. Haven't tested it in Sage yet though, just MCE2005.

[jerryt]

I have read on other sites that people are have good operation of the HD PVR by placing them on their side with a fan blowing directly on the bottom.

Both C1 and C2 versions.

Someone in a position to test this.

Edit, opened my HD PVR up and there is a large chip on the bottom of the cicuit board with no airflow. C2 has a heatsink on one of the chips on the topside of the board and a small fan which only runs during recordings. Wife noted that something smelled hot with the unit on all day, of coarse the fan was off. Verified the smell is from the HD PVR, very warm without any airflow.

[sleonard]

All 3 of mine are on their sides and have a desktop fan blowing on them 24/7. I'm still getting occasional lockups.

S

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by Opus4

Update on the stop frame effect: SageTV says it looks like a dropped frame issue where the driver isn't writing the stream properly with the info needed for hardware decoders -- see this post for more info. Hopefully, the next HD-PVR driver update will fix this.

I didn't think it was that problem initially because I thought that issue would just have skipped frames every few seconds instead of only playing a few frames per second.

- Andy

So while I was up north this weekend I finally had the first full recording which happened to be a Law & Order CI episode that had the dropped frame effect for the whole episode. I guess what I don't understand is why I never had one before and other than commenting in this thread what would cause it. There was recording before it and a recording after it that didn't have this effect. It's just strange that it is so haphazard and up until this weekend I never had it happen. Just an FYI. I just hope that Hauppague gets a new driver out there soon. I'd like to start recording in DD 5.1.

Gerry

[sage.cast.NH]

I purchased a networked power strip so that my custom network encoder software (big hack) detects the lockups on my HD-PVRs. It powers them off.

I had been using a power down time of 10 seconds, but I still had lock-ups requiring a PC reboot.

Then I tried 30 seconds - less lockups requiring a PC reboot, but still once in a while.

I put it at 60 seconds of power down time and I haven't had any lock-ups requiring a PC reboot for two weeks. I still get a glitch where it refuses to record once in a while but my network encoder software keeps "kicking it" until it comes into the show 5 minutes late. No lockups requiring a PC reboot now for two weeks.

So, after every glitch, and after every show, we power down for 60 seconds. Makes the HD-PVR happy. Don't know why, all I know is that it works. Maybe this info will help complete someone else's puzzle...

I have 2 REV C1 boxes and have 300 GB of recordings with these units so far. Using Windoze XP and Total Media Extreme to do the recordings by calling "CaptureModule.exe" directly.

I had this working before Sage supported it. Now that Sage supports it, I'm running a test system this week to see if I can go back to using the supported Sage method.

[Motofreak75]

Today after a few days of testing with my C2 unit.


If the unit is powered on but no recording (i.e. no fan running) overnight, the box is hot. about 47c from my snap-on thermal IR temp gun at some points. When taking the top lid off the heat sink was 57c with no fan running. Having a fan mounted with two sided tape and no vents is useless, what 14 year old kid designed this ? I'm thinking about drilling a lot fo holes on top neatly to let the heat vent, while creating a more vents underneath to allow cooler air in. We shall see if that works.

The IR works great all day long never misses a channel change if I leave the lid off. If I install the lid back on and leave it over night, the IR sensors stop working until I rebooted/cycle the power on the HD-PVR.

anyone else seen IR issues link this ?

[impro]

Strangely when I play the stream from the hard drive it doesn't have the drop frame issue. If I play it on hd100 or client computer it does have it.
I am getting : "please use latest driver" error twice a week.

Originally Posted by Opus4

Update on the stop frame effect: SageTV says it looks like a dropped frame issue where the driver isn't writing the stream properly with the info needed for hardware decoders -- see this post for more info. Hopefully, the next HD-PVR driver update will fix this.

I didn't think it was that problem initially because I thought that issue would just have skipped frames every few seconds instead of only playing a few frames per second.

- Andy

[jerryt]

Originally Posted by Motofreak75

Today after a few days of testing with my C2 unit.


If the unit is powered on but no recording (i.e. no fan running) overnight, the box is hot. about 47c from my snap-on thermal IR temp gun at some points. When taking the top lid off the heat sink was 57c with no fan running.

Modified my HD PVR last night. The bottom was very hot and it took a couple of different fan installations before I found the installation which keeps the unit room temperature.

Here is how I mount a fan. Remove the top (four screws in feet), separate the clear plastic piece with the silver top attached from the gray top (part that takes the four screws). Mount a 120 mm fan blowing down to the gray top. The screw spacing on the 120mm fan allowed it to attach to the gray top with washers on the fan mounting screws. Mounted a coarse mesh screen beteen the fan and the gray top to close the large openings around the fan. Fan runs from 12v laptop power supply.

Nothing cut or drilled on the original box, can be reassembled for warranty claims.

Stays cool to the touch, hot spot on the bottom is gone.

[impro]

Pics please

Originally Posted by jerryt

Modified my HD PVR last night. The bottom was very hot and it took a couple of different fan installations before I found the installation which keeps the unit room temperature.

Here is how I mount a fan. Remove the top (four screws in feet), separate the clear plastic piece with the silver top attached from the gray top (part that takes the four screws). Mount a 120 mm fan blowing down to the gray top. The screw spacing on the 120mm fan allowed it to attach to the gray top with washers on the fan mounting screws. Mounted a coarse mesh screen beteen the fan and the gray top to close the large openings around the fan. Fan runs from 12v laptop power supply.

Nothing cut or drilled on the original box, can be reassembled for warranty claims.

Stays cool to the touch, hot spot on the bottom is gone.

[jerryt]

Originally Posted by impro

Pics please

http://blog.arogan.com/2008/06/haupp...odel-1212.html

This is the original idea, except I left the clear plastic piece off, and mounted the fan with washers which leaves space for the air to exit.

[HelenWeathers]

Well, I've now had two full days of recordings with one HD PVR and no glitches. After reading up on the 720p HD PVR glitch I put both my set-top boxes in 1080i only mode. It worked. I am using only one HD PVR right now but will add the second in a day or two. I put my ATI HDTV Wonder and my nVidia Dual TV analog tuner back in my HTPC, set them up, then added the one HD PVR. I'm running the Sage 6.4 national release. The only issue I have (which I can live with) is that when playing my old dvr-ms files I have to use VMR9 to get the proper aspect ratio from my s-video stretched HDTV recordings done with the analog tuners, and I have to switch to overlay when I play the recordings from my HD PVR to eleminate the jitter. That's a small price to pay though. I have left Windows MCE behind and am moving on to HiDef.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by HelenWeathers

Well, I've now had two full days of recordings with one HD PVR and no glitches. After reading up on the 720p HD PVR glitch I put both my set-top boxes in 1080i only mode. It worked. I am using only one HD PVR right now but will add the second in a day or two.

In my experience, it can take days before another lock occurs, then other times multiple locks occur in the same day. But, I'm going to be running a single unit for a while too to see what happens. (Yes, I know people have voted in the poll that their single unit locks at times.) I had another lock using 1080i-only STB output, so now I'll use only 1 HD-PVR at 1080i to see how long it takes to get a lock that way.

Anyway, I do have a question for you: you mentioned trying a single HD-PVR with the software from Hauppauge & had no locks. Could you post again how you were doing these recordings? Were you scheduling recordings on different channels, same channel, different/same resolutions, etc.? Were they even scheduled somehow, or did you just manually record for a while?

If these were scheduled recordings on different channels & since you seem to say that you can get locks more frequently than I do while using SageTV, you should probably email SageTV at 'betatest at sagetv dot com'.

- Andy

[HelenWeathers]

Originally Posted by Opus4

Anyway, I do have a question for you: you mentioned trying a single HD-PVR with the software from Hauppauge & had no locks. Could you post again how you were doing these recordings? Were you scheduling recordings on different channels, same channel, different/same resolutions, etc.? Were they even scheduled somehow, or did you just manually record for a while? - Andy

Andy, I used the win tv scheduler to schedule 8 hrs of recordings with arcsoft software for each HD PVR. I used one of my PVRs on the first day and the second on the second day. I was trying to see if they were having overheating issues. I had my settop boxes set in 720p for both of those tests. Channel changes occurred every 30 min to 1 hr using the Haup IR blaster. I used max settings and variable average. All recordings completed successfully. That told me the units were OK.

It seems obvious to me that arcsoft has figured out how to get around the shortcomings of the HD PVR. I'm sure they worked very closely with hauppauge during developoment.

I don't know how to get two instances of arcsoft to run at the same time (if it is even possible) or I would do that to test both PVRs at the same time.

I had been sending my logs to sage and they are aware of my tests with one unit.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by HelenWeathers

I had been sending my logs to sage and they are aware of my tests with one unit.

Please send another email to the address I listed above.

- Andy

[HelenWeathers]

Andy - the only log I have left (rolled back my XP, and completely reinstalled Sage 6.4) is from 8/8/08, two hd pvrs and sage 6.4.6. Do you want me to send that or wait till I do get another failure?

[Opus4]

Just send an email; they'll decide where to go from there. You can reference the last couple posts here, but they are expecting to hear from you.

- Andy

[HelenWeathers]

Done deal. I volunteered to set up my system with whichever cards/PVRs they wanted and keep logs. Hope it helps.

[HelenWeathers]

Just so everyone knows, I've been running flawlessly for over a week now. I replaced my older tuner cards with the ones in my signature, did a clean sage install and (knock on wood) everything looks to be working fine.

I think (just a feeling) that my old cards (especially the HDTV Wonder) were throwing my system for a loop.

[toddyus]

Here's my experience: I have two hd-pvrs hooked up to two DirecTV boxes running the latest non-beta of Sage on a quad-core, 4GB (3.5 b/c it's 32-bit), Vista machine.

First, if anyone cares to help me diagnose my problem, I'd appreciate tips on how to setup and retrieve logs.

So here's what happens from my non-scientific observation. One of my two hd-pvrs (we'll call it HDP1) seems to be the primary culprit, although I'm quite certain the other unit has displayed the same behavior albeit less frequently. I get a black/"no signal" screen occasionally, so I will turn off and then back on HDP1 at which point it will function properly. I do not unplug it or disconnect the USB or anything more dramatic.

However, if HDP2 is recording when I turn off HDP1, the blue recording glow goes off, but as far as I can tell, HDP2 continues recording whatever it's recording.

On the one hand, it seems I may simply have a bad unit (HDP1), but it also seems there is some conflict, or at least, undesired interaction between the two units.

One last thing, when I first got these units a couple weeks ago, when I turned them on, they would make a short whirring sound, as though triggering the fan briefly. When I do this now, neither unit makes that sound.

Any thoughts here? Has anyone else seen this interaction? Thanks for any help!