Recording Errors - Unknown Cause

[jillsy]

I have been using SageTV 6.3 on a Windows Vista Home Premium machine for over 6 months. I've been pretty happy with it for the most part. I am using 2 capture cards (a Hauppauge WinTV PVR-500 and a Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1800) so I can record from three different sources at once. The PVR-500 is connected directly to my cable coax (two tuners, up to channel 99), and the HVR-1800 is connected to my cable STB (all channels I subscribe to) via S-Video/audio cables.

I have occasional problems with recordings having errors. For instance, the audio will be out of sync or there will be glitches here and there. I often transfer the .mpg files generated by Sage to a USB drive for viewing on a Samsung LCD TV with a USB port. Sometimes, a show recorded with Sage will appear on the Samsung with a duration of 0:00. I haven't tried to watch an entire program when this happens, but the show will start to play and appears to play fine until I try to fast forward, at which point the Samsung TV will simply advance to the next video stored on the USB drive. I can solve this duration problem by having SageTV convert the original file to a new .mpg file. However, this doesn't always solve out-of-sync audio problems.

At first, I thought my PC's sleep settings were causing the problem. I switched the time from 60 min. to 25 min. at one point and didn't have any recording problems for several months. Then the problem started up again recently and is happening more often now. It seems to happen most often with Mon. night CBS sitcoms, and Thu. night NBC sitcoms. It happens more often with the second, third, fourth, etc. consecutive recording, but sometimes happens with the first recording as well. I don't think the problem has occurred at all with Wed. night CBS sitcoms, and the problem rarely occurs with recordings through the STB (HVR-1800). One way to tell that there's likely going to be a problem is when I see that the file size for a program is smaller than that of other programs of the same duration and the same recording quality.

I was thinking that the problem was with my PVR-500, but this card is also used to record everyday for an hour on GSN and there is rarely a problem. Also, I used the DVR feature of Windows Media Center for a few weeks before installing Sage and there were no problems with the Media Center recordings. Could there be a problem with the NBC and CBS signals causing recording errors?

This problem is getting more and more annoying so any help would be appreciated. I really thought I'd solved it with the sleep settings change, but apparently not. I know there have been occasional Windows and Java updates, but I can't say if any of these coincided with the recurrence of my recording problems. I'm sorry for the long post, but I wanted to explain everything.

Thanks,
Jill