Stuttering on HD Extender from HD OTA input??

[172pilot]

I had a problem yesterday watching the Steelers game - It would run fine for a while, then typically when, or near when they went to commercial, it would stutter, and then completely freeze. i would have to switch to another HD channel, which would cancel the recording of the Steelers game, then switch it back to that channel, and it'd be fine for a while again, only to repeat..

At first I thought it was just a typical windows memory leak thing, so I rebooted, then in case it was having trouble with a full disk, I deleted all my old sage recordings, leaving 1tb completely free, but nothing fixed it...

I saw another post about codec packs and fixing stuttering, but would that affect the HD extender, or only video rendered on the PC/server? Also, it's NEVER done this... and it didn't do it on the earlier FOX NFC game, so I'm wondering what it could be?

My sage box has two Hauppauge 1600 cards, with basic cable into their analog inputs, and an OTA antenna split between the two digital inputs. Is it OK to have two of these identical cards? I also have an HDPVR, but it was disconnected at the time, so shouldn't be a factor... Signal strength on the channel I was recording showed around 80%, which seemed good enough...

Anyone ever seen this before? Usually I only have trouble watching HD output on the MVPs because of the transcoding required.. :-)

BTW - I HAD the latest Beta firmware on the HD Extender, but backed it out to the latest released version when it started acting up.. no difference.. and, I'm running sage 6.5.6 on server 2003. Athlon 64 x2 3800+ Dual core w/ 2 gigs of RAM.

Thanks in advance!
-Steve

[dadof4]

Sounds like signal strength. When I was running OTA I would see the same problem at 75%-80%. Next time you see the problem try removing the splitter and running straight from the antenna to one of the 1600's to see if the problem is corrected.

Rich

[metapath]

This is actually a very common problem with OTA, at least out here in the boonies where I am. About 12 miles as the crow flies from Seattle and with a lot of 80 - 120 ft fir trees in my signal path.

It's especially irksome when it gets foggy or snowy weather-wise. PBS (9) is my best station but it occasionally has the problem. NBC (5) is second best and decent but CBS (7) breaks up and pauses a lot. I can't get ABC (4) at all, even though they are the same distance and direction that NBC is.

A stronger antenna may help, or higher altitude. I'll bet you don't see the problem on your cable feed.

[paulbeers]

Definately signal strength. If you can, you can always record a show and play it back on your server to verify if it is in the recording. There are many factors in getting good HD reception, signal strength is only part of it, there is also the dreaded Signal Quality which generally goes unchecked (just because you get a lot of signal, doesn't mean it is clean)....