So... PVR 500 boards. Am I the only one?

[sfisher]

So here I am still using my dedicated 5 year old Dell Dimension 2400 (2GHz, XP Pro) with 2 PVR 500 boards giving me 4 tuners, on cable standard TV channels (no stb's required) Works fairly well with a minor fix, below...

I realize as some point I'm going to have to upgrade my box, it's just not a good time anytime soon as long as its all working (knock on wood) (can't get new PVR 500's and Xp is getting old) I leave it recording 23 1/2 hrs a day. (More on that below)

One of my real concerns though, is that Sage might drop support for the board or maybe XP sometime soon. *Please don't SageTV* I like most of the changes you've added over the years and would hate to be left out, or worse irreversibly dead in the water.

Finally, if there are any others still out there, besides me, using the PVR 500's. (Or others encountering the same issue.) I had problems over the past few years where one of the tuners on a board, would quit working, the sound would go to white noise, and the channel wouldn't change. By a bit of trail and error I found that if I shutdown and re-started the SageTV service once a day via the scheduler it eliminated the problem. I originally set the service to re-start around 6AM in the morning, but occasionally I would still have a problem during prime-time. So these days I re-start the service at 4:01 PM. It takes about 25 minutes for the service to finish initializing... therefore 23 1/2 hrs a day. (Hope this helps somebody.

[Fuzzy]

I've used at least one PVR-500 continuously for years now without any problems... the difference is I haven't used the actual tuner on it for a LONG time. Also, i wouldn't worry about upgrading the box.. what you've got is fine for most sage use (especially SD only). It should be enough even if you upgraded to an HDHomeRun or two, as there is really no more processing to do, just a bit more data to write to the drive.

and based on the number of users out there, I wouldn't worry about xp support disappearing anytime soon (or distant future, for that matter).

[sfisher]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

I've used at least one PVR-500 continuously for years now without any problems... the difference is I haven't used the actual tuner on it for a LONG time.

So does that mean that your feeding it with S-Video feeds from two STB's and you're using two Ir blasters to change channels?

[Fuzzy]

Correct, I'm feeding it via S-video from 2 dish 211's, controlled via a single USB-UIRT. Dish boxes have IR addresses, so you can control MANY of them individually with just a single IR emitter.

[carlgar]

Originally Posted by sfisher

One of my real concerns though, is that Sage might drop support for the board or maybe XP sometime soon. *Please don't SageTV* I like most of the changes you've added over the years and would hate to be left out, or worse irreversibly dead in the water.

I am surprised that you would even think that Sage would drop support for PVR-500. I have 2 of them in my system and would let Sage know very quickly if they stopped working in a beta release. About a year ago when I started using the power management, I encountered some issues with the PVR-500s. Sage support corrected the problems. I have not seen any problems related to Sage with them since. I did encounter an issue the other night that caused to lose some recordings but I believe that was related to a power glitch that occurred while my system was sleeping.

[tahoetim]

I have a 500 and a 250 in my system. I feed them with cable box outputs thru coax. I am running WHS and have never had a failure like you describe. You might want to check your power saving/sleep settings on your pc.

[carlgar]

I don't think it had anything to do with my power management settings. I think it is more likely related to my signal amplifier which is connected to a smart switch. Since my system was in sleep mode there was no power to my amplifier. I did not do much work to try to track down the issue. I was frustrated by the time I realized the problem was with the 500s instead of my HDHRs. I just happened to have done a channel scan with the HDHRs the day before and jumped to the conclusion that it had screwed up the channels. All recordings before the power failure were fine. After the power failure the pvr-500 recordings were all static. I know the cable signal was good at the time I noticed the issue because I checked that with my TV. Once I stopped Sage and restarted it everything was fine again. I consider this a one time random event, but it should not have occurred since everything is behind a UPS. I heard my UPS alarm that alerted me to the power failure. I was using my laptop at the time.

[tahoetim]

I was replying to the original post, not yours. His issue acts like a hard drive spin down issue to me. It's just a guess...

[JREkiwi]

My PVR 500 recently developed a similar sounding problem. SageTV support got me to set the following in Sage.properties and it cured it for me.

mmc/set_crossbar_redundantly=true

John