Hauppauge HVR 4000 card problems

[motobarsteward]

As I was for-warned, I am experiencing some problems with using these cards in my system. I am raising the issues with SageTV and I'll keep you posted.

1. Stutter on clients when I'm recording with one and watching live with the other. I also get this if I time-shift on one card. This is most likely a server issue and may not be anything to do with Sage but I have asked them to tell me how to go about solving the problem. I used to get this occasionally with my old MCE500 system but it is chronic with the new HVR4000s

2. When the program ends and runs onto the next whilst watching live, the sound appears to continue but the video freezes. Hitting the jump-forward button seams to fix this until we get to the next program boundary. I have not talked with sage about this yet as I want to get the system stable first (See problem 1.)

3. Exceptions occasionally when using DVB-T part of a card. I am trying to find a way of re-producing this reliably and, when I can, I will raise the issue with Sage.

The upside is that picture quality is much improved and BBC HD is good.

[motobarsteward]

I thought I'd summarise progress....


Not a lot.


Qian is saying that they have known issues with the HVR4000. It looks like SageTV has problems in configuring its self to use this card, especially when there are two of them in the system! He didn't say what the problem was but stated that they knew how to fix it but were debating internally the best way of implementing it.

I reduced every thing back to the server not running in service mode and the client using the native gui and my periodic judder problems went away. When I restored to service mode and when back to the MC gui, everything appeared OK for a couple of days then the judder and stopped video issues returned.

So, I'm still working on it and I will help Qian in any way I can so, hopefully, some good will come out of my (and my families) pain.

[motobarsteward]

I have found that turning off the feature that retunes the channels at the beginning/end of program has increased stability massively. I had this left on from my previous setup when I had external Sky boxes for tuning.

I have also disabled data reception on the cards because I get my EPG from DigiGuide. This has also helped.

[motobarsteward]

I thought things would get better with this new version, especially as support of the HVR-4000 is meantioned in the release note.

I hve found, afetr upgrading to SageTV 7 that it is only findone of the DVB-S receivers. I have raised an issue with Sage and will post updates as I get them