Please Help Me Resolve MY Setup's Issues

[mskitty666]

Have you tested your hard drives to make sure that you do not have an issue with bad hard drives or a bad controller? Have you verified your signal strength? If you are really recording to seperate hard drives and are using 64k cluster sizes, then you shouldn't be having these issues. Are you seeing this studdering on the HD100's?

I have not yet tested the drives. I do always test new drive when I put them. The signal strength is 100% both in WinTV and SageTV. I did some testing when I specified the drives and yes each is assigned to a different physical drive which is always formatted 64k. When I have a problem video it does not play on the extenders either. I also went back to the default STV to see if that was an issue, it wasn't.

QUESTION: Did running the cable to the single tuner improve your signal, watchability?

My HD stutters on one tuner, but this new problem affects SD as well. The best I can dois test cable directly from my wall outlet (apartment & don't know where the demarc is & they probably lock it). That is a HUGE undertaking as it involves shutting down for a while and taking apart my entertainment stand. I will try it last because my new issues obviously have something to do with my recent changes. My cable company is moving channels around and adding some new ones and we've had signal issues with them the entire time we've lived here. It has never affected SD though, only digital.

Ya know, earlier this year I replaces a failed recording drive with a 750GB I got on sale, so thought, "Why not allow the SD cards to encode at the HIGHEST rate?" So I set my old PVR-500 to MPEG2 Max Quality (5.9GB/hr) and a week later notices all the subsequent recordings had errors that Video-Redo couldn't fix. My HDHR recordings were fine. Back to BEST (3.0 GB/hr) I went!

I noticed problems right away when I upped the recording quality. But if it wasn't appropriate to record at max quality why is it an option with no warning? The HD stutter is an on again off again long term problem that I'm making progress with. This new totally mad screwed up beyond repair SD, HD problem has occured magically after upgrading SageTV and quality. I already chaned the quality to DVD Standard.If it is the quality setting does that mean the affected videos are permanently damaged and beyond repair?

My next step is updating my motherboard drivers. I only do this when necessary. Biostar just released a lot of new drivers in September. I have downloaded everything and will be tackling that at the end of this week. I'm hoping changing the record quality will fix this. I will also be testing each hard drive for errors, but am extremely skeptical. They are all Seagate drives, tested fine when purchased and I have never, ever had one of my Seagates go bad yet.Thanks for the suggestions, I will report back how things go after all the testing is completed.

[Conejo]

Originally Posted by mskitty666

I noticed problems right away when I upped the recording quality. But if it wasn't appropriate to record at max quality why is it an option with no warning?

I believe encoding mpeg2 is just as much an art as it is a science. Since my PVR-500 uses a hardware based encoder I'm assuming it's a bus speed thing combined with a Monday morning version driver. It probably works in some flavor of machine, just not mine.

While you do your diagnostics, I'd suggest you separately test BOTH your encoding/recording subsystem and your playback subsystem:
A. Ability of tuners to write good watchable mpeg files to disk (viewed from several types of players)
B. Compare same file playback both locally and through HD extenders.

Basically, your trying to pinpoint where the bottleneck or point-of-error is occurring. It could be in one or both subsystems.

[mskitty666]

Thanks everyone for all your help and suggestions. In case anyone comes across this in the future I'm updating with my results. Changing the recording quality on my analog tuners from max to dvd standard eliminated my fast recordings problem. Unfortunately the affected recordings were permanently ruined and could not be repaired. Some of my other issues seem to also have been signal issues with my provider. For about one week many recordings had skips and stutter not related to anything else. I did test my drives which were all reported to be ok. I discovered some Nero crap running in the background and wiped out it's existence with Ccleaner. That was probably responsible for some of the minor stutters that when paused or rewound played perfectly fine. I haven't really noticed that problem since eliminating the background offenders.

I, like many others still have issues with HD. It's not as bad as it was. Many shows are watchable. But, I have decided that trying to incorporate HD into my first build was a mistake. I am ordering an HVR 2250 to use as a dual analog tuner with the ability to change the inputs to digital later on. This will give me the tuners I need to reliably record everything now and allow me to leisurely run down my HD problem.