Anyone have any luck with HDPVR?

[rick s]

Hello again, I am two weeks into the trial for sage and still it constantly crashes. Sometimes I can get video ok, but then when I change the channel it locks up on me. I really would like to get this thing to work, because right now it's either this or Beyond TV and Sage seems like it has more features, but there's no way I'm buying unless it works. As it stands now, Beyond has worked flawlessly, but again, Sage looks like the cooler product, if it will work with the HDPVR.


Intel E4500
Intel DG965WH
Dual Seagate 250gig running Raid 0
Seagate 750gig
4 Gigs Ram
Windows Vista
His HD2600XT 512mb DDR3

[paulbeers]

Been using the HDPVR for 2+ months now with no problems. I use the STX-HD100 for perfect playback. My wife loves being able to watch Discovery Channel in HD.

[dadof4]

I am a former BeyondTV user. I switched to SageTV a couple of months ago as I wanted PVR capabilities on additional televisions. BTV requires an additional client PC for each set. I tried out the SageTV trial and was impressed. It performed equally as well as BTV using a DVI>HDMI connection to my primary TV. Given I already owned a Hauppauge MVP I used it during the trial on a second TV. My experience was positive. The MVP extender's performance sold me on Sage. I now have two HD100's and two MVP's. With BTV I would have required three additional PC clients. As with any new software, there was a learning curve but my previous experience with BTV did help.

I eliminated my DVI>HDMI connection and switched to a HD100. Although both worked the HD100 provided a much quicker interface with a more responsive traverse of the timeline when forwarding or reversing. As my server is not that powerful the use of extenders eliminated overloading the PC.

I am two days into owning an HDPVR and it's working great. There is absolutely no stuttering. At times I think I am perceiving a slight audio sync issue. My wife tells me she can't see it so if it is out of sync it's minimal.

I have yet to have a crash since I started to use extenders exclusively. I recall have a couple of crashes when I was using my underpowered PC linked to my TV. I reboot about once a week. The Sage PC is a dedicated PVR with XP Pro. It was a fresh OS install before I installed BTV. I kept BTV on the PC for about a month after I installed SageTV for a security blanket.

I think the best thing you can do to make your set up stable and to increase it's performance is to go with extenders. It eliminates issues with your video card and it's driver not to mentions all of the problems that can be attributed to codecs.

Hope this helps.

Rich

[HelenWeathers]

I've been running 2 HD PVRs now for three weeks without a single glitch. I bought SageTV just because of the HD PVR support. I had some rough times when I started (had some 4+ year old tuners in my system that just didn't want to behave). I'm glad I stuck with it. I love SageTVs flexability.

[Clift]

I, too, had a tough time in the beginning. I ended up buying the Sgae license after the trial was over even before my system was 100% working because I had glimmers of hope where it would run almost flawlessly until I tried to tweak it and broke something. The kicker was, though, that I was relentless and knew it could work from my experience with it. I'm glad I stuck with it though because it has been working pretty flawlessly for a while now. The only issue I have is the HD PVR sometimes has a bit of a problem syncing with the computer when it comes out of S3 sleep. That happens maybe once per week. My client is only on one TV so the HD PVR is easily accessible. A quick power cycle of the unit always brings it back. That's a small price to pay to be able to record and timeshift all my HD channels. And I'm still confident that in time the drivers will become flawless.

[btrcp2000]

I hated my hdpvr until I finally got smart and starting using my usbuirt for channel changes. Really dumb of me not to, because it was sitting right there anyway for something else. Now it hasn't skipped a beat in a few weeks.

Extenders are a must have, IMO. Obviously they are the most stable way to access your media, but to me there is more. I still occasionally use the sage server itelf as a client when we take to projector outside for football games, movie nights, etc. I always realize what a PITA sage is as an overlay on windows, whether it be that some new video format is skipping, or for some reason there is no sound, or the mouse cursor won't go away, or windows desperately wants to inform me of something stupid, so sage exits fullscreen mode and twenty people sit patiently in my driveway staring at my windows desktop while I run downstairs to restart it. I have three extenders, need two more and comm skip on the hdpvr and this three year journey is finished.

Ironically, I started with Beyond which was free after rebate, thinking that this would be a cheap and quick way to have a DVR since I had an old computer laying around anyway. Fast forward three years, and I probably have $5000 and countless hours into my sage setup!

[sic0048]

Originally Posted by dadof4

At times I think I am perceiving a slight audio sync issue. My wife tells me she can't see it so if it is out of sync it's minimal.

Rich

This is a known issue and it is on the HD-PVR side (ie using Sage or not doesn't make a difference). Hauppauge is going to issue a firmware update that is suppose to fix the problem. We are just waiting on them to actually get a working firmware update But this should be a problem that is fixed in the future and it isn't a Sage related problem.