HD-PVR Stops Responding ~Once/Day

[jerryt]

Originally Posted by Chriscic

I have a notebook cooling pad coming tomorrow, and I'm going to try that first on the theory that these things are super-sensitive to over-heating.

My personal opinion is that it is the USB which is super-sensitive...

[Chriscic]

I have a hard time with the USB theory having had lock-ups on four different machines. Have to believe at least one of those machines would have had "good" USB ports.

[ewelin]

I still say it's voodoo....

[Chriscic]

The answer is out there... somewhere.

[cat6man]

chris,
try standing the unit on its side........i do that with my boxes and have a small usb fan pointed at them

[Chriscic]

Originally Posted by cat6man

chris,
try standing the unit on its side........i do that with my boxes and have a small usb fan pointed at them

I'll try it, along with the notebook cooling pad that should be arriving today.

Subjectively, it did seem that at one point when I had the HD-PVR hanging in mid-air suspended only by the attached cables I had fewer lock-ups. But I can't be sure.

If it's an overheating issue with my units I am going to have that figured out within a few days. I'll report back here.

[White94Cobra]

No lockups for 12 days and counting. Prior record was 1 day. I've recorded about 35 shows during that time and everything seems to be working (knock on wood). I made the following changes, and I'm not willing to experiment to see which one worked, as I may never get it stable again.

Moved all other USB devices off to a powered hub. I did not check to see if the hub and the HD PVR are plugged into separate USB controllers.

Upped my Java heap size to 1G (was 768M).

Downgraded to 1.0.5.301 driver.

[jerryt]

I am on 1.5.6.1 drivers for 13 days with one lock up of the server, it was recording when dishnet did a 3am software update. Had to reboot the server.

Last change was placing the HD-PVR on it's own enhanced USB controller, all other USD devices are on a different controller.

[sic0048]

Originally Posted by White94Cobra

No lockups for 12 days and counting. Prior record was 1 day. I've recorded about 35 shows during that time and everything seems to be working (knock on wood). I made the following changes, and I'm not willing to experiment to see which one worked, as I may never get it stable again.

Moved all other USB devices off to a powered hub. I did not check to see if the hub and the HD PVR are plugged into separate USB controllers.

Upped my Java heap size to 1G (was 768M).

Downgraded to 1.0.5.301 driver.

I'll go out on a limb and speculate what did it - downgrading to 1.0.5.301 would be on the top of the list IMHO.

[Chriscic]

The notebook cooling fan, and generally positioning the HD-PVRs on their sides in a relatively cool place, had no effect.

Right now, the audio just gets so amazingly out of sync (3+ seconds lag), and fairly quickly, that I think that's what's blowing it up. I seem to recall someone else saying they'd see things get out of sync and then blow up every 50 minutes. I haven't timed it, but that seems about right.

Again, since I ran about 5 months flawlessly without changing anything (1.5.6.0 beta drivers), and then all of a sudden started losing audio sync and eventually locking up, I still think Dish changed something at least on my boxes.

I'm going to try to roll back to those old drivers and then if that doesn't work try the analog sound with the 1.5.6.1 WHQL drivers. I hate to lose 5.1, but I'm at my wit's end. Guess I'd still be getting 5.1 on the locals which I get via antenna and HD Homerun.

[sic0048]

Originally Posted by Chriscic

Right now, the audio just gets so amazingly out of sync (3+ seconds lag), and fairly quickly, that I think that's what's blowing it up. I seem to recall someone else saying they'd see things get out of sync and then blow up every 50 minutes. I haven't timed it, but that seems about right.

Again, since I ran about 5 months flawlessly without changing anything (1.5.6.0 beta drivers), and then all of a sudden started losing audio sync and eventually locking up, I still think Dish changed something at least on my boxes.

I'm going to try to roll back to those old drivers and then if that doesn't work try the analog sound with the 1.5.6.1 WHQL drivers. I hate to lose 5.1, but I'm at my wit's end. Guess I'd still be getting 5.1 on the locals which I get via antenna and HD Homerun.

I saw similar things with my Dish STB and the two newer drivers. Going back to the tried and true .301 drivers seemed to help. I'm just using analog audio (all I've ever been willing to risk). I'd rather have a watchable and reliable recording with analog sound than a problematic one with digital sound (when it works). That's just my opinion, but the main reason I've not tried to tempt fate and use digitial audio.

[Chriscic]

The funny thing is, I believe the release notes for the latest drivers say they fixed an issue with audio sync on Dish receivers. Go figure.

[jerryt]

Originally Posted by sic0048

I saw similar things with my Dish STB and the two newer drivers. Going back to the tried and true .301 drivers seemed to help. I'm just using analog audio (all I've ever been willing to risk). I'd rather have a watchable and reliable recording with analog sound than a problematic one with digital sound (when it works). That's just my opinion, but the main reason I've not tried to tempt fate and use digitial audio.

I got the "Out of sync and under water audio with a lockup of the HD-PVR" today with dishnet, 14 day after installing the 1.5.6.1 drivers (using only analog sound). So back to 1.0.5.301 drivers for me.

Hauppauge really should look at the 1.0.5.301 drivers and see what they did right with those drivers.

[eric3a]

Right now, the audio just gets so amazingly out of sync (3+ seconds lag), and fairly quickly, that I think that's what's blowing it up. I seem to recall someone else saying they'd see things get out of sync and then blow up every 50 minutes. I haven't timed it, but that seems about right.

I had that problem. Until I downgraded to 1.0.5.301 drivers.

Eric

[sportera]

Originally Posted by Chriscic

Right now, the audio just gets so amazingly out of sync (3+ seconds lag), and fairly quickly, that I think that's what's blowing it up. I seem to recall someone else saying they'd see things get out of sync and then blow up every 50 minutes. I haven't timed it, but that seems about right.

I had that same problem and found that using VMR9 vs EVR was causing my problem. I also switched to using nvidia purevideo video & audio at the same time I went to EVR but I really believe using VMR9 was the problem. Now using EVR at both WHS and Client PC and the sync problem cleared up.

[Chriscic]

I'm already using EVR. Also, the audio is way out of sync when viewed on either the PC or my HD200. So, it is in the recording not the playback, and EVR vs. VMR9 only affect playback, not the recording itself as far as I know. Still, thanks for sharing the theory. Possible that you had entirely different playback issues than what we're experiencing.

I went back to the older drivers last night, and intially had good results (although somehow I missed the Survivor airing for the third straight week... I think I bumped the USB-UIRT and it didn't change the channel correctly), but only a few hours so too early to say if it really helped . I didn't see the audio out-of-syncs immediately at least. I had to take the entire server down and apart this morning for some work being done in my basement, but should be back up and running tonight and I'll report back on how it works out.

Incidentally, I realized that when I initially added the notebook cooling fans and tilted the HD-PVRs on their side, I brilliantly plugged the SPDIF into the "out" rather the "in" on one of the HD-PVRs, and that was mucking things up. So I can't say yet whether better cooling helps or not my my setup. Will have to test this again later.

[Rico66]

Originally Posted by jerryt

I got the "Out of sync and under water audio with a lockup of the HD-PVR" today with dishnet, 14 day after installing the 1.5.6.1 drivers (using only analog sound). So back to 1.0.5.301 drivers for me.

Hauppauge really should look at the 1.0.5.301 drivers and see what they did right with those drivers.

I have one channel which is pretty much "under water" all the time with 1.5.6.1. It's a bit better with 1.5.6.0 or 1.0.5.301 (which doesn't really make a big difference in my case), since I can watch this channel after resetting the hd pvr. Then it'll work for some (undefined) time. Luckily it's only one channel that I can live with.
But yes, the hd pvr has problems with certain source signals, and tends to lock-up if something is not "clean".

[Skirge01]

Originally Posted by briands

You Fool!!! You have just tempted the VooDoo god of HDPVR... your setup will certainly fail soon.

I wanted to report back that we recently redid our entire TV room with new carpeting, which required everything to be disconnected and rewired. We also rearranged all the furniture and the TV while we were at it. After hooking everything back up, the only thing that messed up was channel changing, which a few reboots of the DirecTV boxes and HD-PVR managed to fix. I even changed the COM port I was using for channel changing on one of the tuners. I've been going for 3 weeks without any issues.

The common denominator for those having issues still seems to be the Dish STB.

[eric3a]

I wanted to report back that we recently redid our entire TV room with new carpeting

That's it!
The solution to stable HDPVRs is new carpeting!

It does appear a number of us who had issues have Dish STBs, but from polls I've seen around the interwebs I don't think we're the only ones.

Eric

[joe123]

Originally Posted by White94Cobra

I just purchased an HD-PVR almost two weeks ago. It seemed to work fine for the first week, now it locks up 1-3 times per day. This sucks because I waited over a year to get one hoping the bugs had been worked out.

.

Count me in!

So is there a fix for this shinola?

Sounds like a lot of this and that and nothing sticks.