HD-PVR issues/questions

[2002cbr600f4i]

Hey gang,

Ok, pretty much done doing major surgery on my setup. Made some massive changes-

Went from:
DirectTV, standard Def tuner
AMD 4800X2 AM2, 2GB DDR2-800 ram, NV chipset
Hauppauge 250 capture card
Windows Vista 32 bit

To:
Comcast standard Def tuner
same CPU+RAM, AMD chipset (old MB died)
Hauppage HD-PVR
Windows 7 64 bit

It's been quite the adventure, but I have sage up and running now. Couple questions/issues though:

1) Anyone have a IR Blaster config for the Comcast standard Def tuner? I didn't have a chance to really mess with it last night (finished setitng up around 1am) so right now I can't control the box. It's stuck on whatever channel it's on.

2) When in sage, when I hit "Watch Live TV" it seems to take like 5-10 seconds before anything comes on the screen, and it always says in a red box in the center "No Signal" for another 3-5 seconds before I get a picture. Any way to speed that up? I would hate to have to wait for that every time I have it change channel on the STB...

3) While watching Live TV, it would be fine for about 1-2 minutes and then it started stuttering (like a low bandwidth situation.) I have all the decoders and overlays and such in Sage set to "Default". I'm only capturing Standard Def video so I would think the HD-PVR should be able to easily handle it. Is there something I need to change to get it working better? Or could it be a hard drive issue (the capture drive is nearly full and I'm not 100% sure it's formatted using 64 size blocks... I need to get data off that drive and reformat it tonight actually...)

Is there anything else I need to be aware of with using this HD-PVR???

Thanks!

--Mike

[robk]

I just finished up a very similar "surgery" yesterday and am extremely pleased with the results. New MB, CPU, HD PVR, Sage, drivers, codecs, etc.

1. Can you trade in the SD box for a HD one? They are obviously newer, more options - I got one (SA 4640) that has a 1394 Firewire port. I control the STB tuning by FW, MUCH faster than a blaster that I have used over the years with various DirecTV and Dish boxes. Search: FWChannelProxy
2. The HD PVR does seem to take a few seconds to kick in, but I don't get "no signal". I don't know why that is happening, but someone here will chime in with an answer.
3. I started with 2 clean WD 500G drives, made a 50G partition for the OS (Win7) and formatted the rest with 64K clusters. Makes a big difference, I found that out a long time ago - hard drives are slow and even slower when they are nearly full and fragmented. If you're a Sage user, you know you are writing the video and audio to the hard drive constantly and simultaneously reading it back to display it (in "live" TV), that's quite a task for a drive that's not cleaned up. Check chipset drivers for latest SATA or IDE drivers, since you changed the MB - don't trust the CD that comes with the MB.

Tips: well, I'm not really knowledgeable to speak on that too much. But, you should use EVA mode, not overlay with Win7, search for Win7 64bit problems - there are a few regarding channel changing if I recall, I went with 32bit Ultimate. For the H264 decoder, install the TME that came with the HD PVR to get the codec installed and use it in sage for HD decoding when you get there. Also, search:native recording patch, I believe it still applies to Win7 Sage installs.

I can say that after thinking SageTV was a mediocre application during the 6 years I've been using it, finally with the HD PVR it absolutely shines - like they were meant for each other! Everything that I wanted in a Soft PVR I now have (except I'm watching on a 22" DVI monitor and would like it if someone donated a 52" LCD But, that monitor is shared with the computer for tasks like video conversion for my Palm TX, commercial deletion, DVD burning, etc.) I think a big part of the success was a faster system (Thanks Fuzzy!) and a fresh install of Win7 on clean drives.


Hope you get it working well - keep at it and pay attention to the hard drives!
Good luck-
Rob

[2002cbr600f4i]

Yeah, I know about the drive issue with it being full. When the old MB went T.U. I had to scramble to get data off the NV-Raid 5 array and was having to use every nook and cranny of drive space I had elsewhere to put it. Now that I have a new 2TB drive in there I can get all that stuff off my recordings drive and that should help... I might also switch to a SATA 750 GB drive for that instead of the older 200GB PATA one that I'm using right now.

Hmmm.. There IS a FW port on the back of the SD unit. I really don't want to go up to HD right now. I mostly use sage to:

1) archive stuff I want to watch long term (cooking shows, shuttle launches, that sort of stuff.)
2) be able to stream live TV to a pair of Hauppauge Media MVP units I have in the bedroom and familyroom, and to my laptop while I'm out and about. The only HD TV I have in the house is in the livingroom and is hooked to the Comcast HD-PVR box, so no need to capture in HD on Sage.

Thanks for the other info. I'll give that stuff a try this weekend.

[MattHelm]

Originally Posted by 2002cbr600f4i

...when I hit "Watch Live TV" ...

What is this "Live TV you speak of???

Yes, the HDPVR takes a bit before it sinks with the video coming it, then it takes a bit to start the stream. Normally when SageTV see you have a HDPVR, it adds a 4 second just for that in the settings. I've never seen it in recordings, and I never watch anything live. Even my "favorites", I let it record a bit so I can jump over the ads!

[2002cbr600f4i]

Originally Posted by MattHelm

What is this "Live TV you speak of???

Yes, the HDPVR takes a bit before it sinks with the video coming it, then it takes a bit to start the stream. Normally when SageTV see you have a HDPVR, it adds a 4 second just for that in the settings. I've never seen it in recordings, and I never watch anything live. Even my "favorites", I let it record a bit so I can jump over the ads!

Well, I'm mostly concerned that if I have a recording set up to fire, it'll miss the first 20-30 seconds because of all the syncing.

I only watch live when I'm in bed flipping channels. I effectively try to use sage as a cable box in the bedroom, with the rewind/pause capability.

When on the road for work, or out and about with the laptop, I will often hook up to Sage to catch a bit of TV as well. That's often live as well.

[sic0048]

Originally Posted by 2002cbr600f4i

2) When in sage, when I hit "Watch Live TV" it seems to take like 5-10 seconds before anything comes on the screen, and it always says in a red box in the center "No Signal" for another 3-5 seconds before I get a picture. Any way to speed that up? I would hate to have to wait for that every time I have it change channel on the STB...
--Mike

Originally Posted by robk

2. The HD PVR does seem to take a few seconds to kick in, but I don't get "no signal". I don't know why that is happening, but someone here will chime in with an answer.
Rob

My experiences have been like Rob's. It takes about 4-5 seconds to see video on the screen and sometimes it takes the audio another second or two before it syncs up (with "Live TV" - don't notice this behavior with fully recorded shows). I do not get the "No Signal" screen unless my HD-PVR has locked up. In my experience, it also shouldn't take 10-12 seconds for all this to sort itself out either.

[2002cbr600f4i]

Well, I only just got Sage working at like 1am last night, so I didn't have a lot of time to mess with it. I'll play with it more tonight and tomorrow and see if I can get things working better.

Hopefully I can get the drive stuttering and IR blaster issues resolved tonight. Those are the 2 biggies right now.

Thanks for the help guys. I'll post my results...

--Mike

[sflamm]

What are you using to process the commercials? I do not have a HD-PVR yet and I have been using the old version of ShowAnalyzer (0.9.7) on my recording from my HDHRs. I dont believe that will process H264 that the HD-PVR produces. Am I right?

I have a copy of the new version of ShowAnalyzer (1.0.59.783) that I believe will handle H264, but I tried it on my MPEG-2 recordings coming out of my HDHR and it performed worse than the old version - so I have been hessitant to upgrade.

Can anyone tell me what they use succesfully with the HD-PVR?

I'm afraid I need to setup an STB/HD-PVR combo soon since Comcast has recently encrypted a lot of the stations (bastards!)

Thanks in advance.

[fidget]

If I standing next to my HD-PVR when I tune a channel, I see the LED on the USB-UIRT flash for each digit in the channel, then I see the light come on for the HD-PVR (by this time, I see NO SIGNAL on the screen) and then three seconds later, I see the program start to play back.

What I think is happening is this: the playback portion of Sage expects to receive a stream as soon as it sees a channel tune. I think that Sage waits to start recording until after the channel has been tuned because various channels may have different resolutions (not the case with my Dish Network box, but it is a big world out there). The default delay between digits in the channel is either 600 or 800 milliseconds, more than enough time to timeout the player. Once the recording starts, it needs to go from the HD-PVR to the disk and then to the player. If you could toggle between a HD-PVR recoding and live TV, you would probably see a couple three seconds in the two videos.

In order to fix some channel changing problems that I have seen, I have been slowly turning down the key delay, so you may want to see if that will solve (or reduce) your NO SIGNAL problem.

[2002cbr600f4i]

ok, managed to get 2 of the old 750GB drives into the machine.... For some reason if I try to add either of the other 2 it causes the machine to BSOD on boot. Sigh... Guess I'll just put those into my mac pro...

Anyhow, formatted one of them with 64K blocks, also reduced the recording quality on the HD-PVR to lowest (I figured lowest HD is still at least as good as Standard Def which is all I'm capturing anyhow.) So far, no stuttering problems, so that's good.

Still need to figure out the IR blaster stuff... I had installed according to the posted instructions (installed the 3 accessory programs before installing Sage). Just need to sit down and mess with it...

No dice on controlling the box with FW. Turns out this new MB doesn't have FW anywhere on it....

[davephan]

What are you using to try to switch the channels? I couldn't ever get Hauppauge HD-PVR IR blaster to work. When I tired to use the built-in IR blaster, the HD-PVR would become very unstable. Many people use the USB-UIRT to change the channels on the set top boxes. There are 3 USB-UIRT zones, to control 3 set top boxes. If the set top boxes can use different codes, then you can control many more than three set top boxes with one USB-UIRT. If you cover up the HD-PVR IR sensor, the HD-PVR stability may improve.

SageTV is too slow for channel surfing. You need to have a separate set top box when you want to surf channels, or get used to surfing channels from the program guide, not by the channel up and down buttons.

I recommend that you do not partition your boot drive. Use the boot drive for the operating system and programs only. Use other physical drives for video file storage. Each video drive must be formatted with 64k blocks, which is not the default size. Use disk imaging to backup the boot / programs drive. Store the image files on a video drive and a separate USB hard drive. If you can't afford commercial disk imaging software like Acronis, use the free Partition Image is Not Ghost software. The free PING software recoveries sometimes fail, so that is a good reason to spend the money on Acronis. If you decide to spend the money on Acronis, search the Internet for a discount code. Then buy the software from Acronis with the discount code, do not buy from the untrusted web site with the discount code.

Dave

[robk]

Originally Posted by davephan

I recommend that you do not partition your boot drive.

Is this because of the cluster size? I use (2) 500G ED Caviar Black, first one is partitioned 50Gig NTFS 4K clusters (OS + programs), 450Gig NTFS 64K clusters (Video). Easeus Partition Master will format partitions on the same physical disk with different cluster sizes. Or are you saying that too much activity on one drive will result from the OS and Video residing on the same drive?

I use Acronis True Image 10, yes 10 on Win7 (change the name of the main executable to ti.exe so Win7 doesn't block it - works fine) to image the 50Gig OS partition for backup. I don't backup Video.

I've been doing this for quite a while, before switching to HD - no problems. I use the first drive for TV shows, the second drive for movies, either recorded, downloaded or DVD rips.
Rob

[davephan]

I don't store Videos on my boot/programs drive for two reasons. To separate the activity of the boot/programs drive and the video storage drive(s), and to allow me to image the boot/programs drive as a drive and not a partition. The video is too big to backup all of it. I do protect my video files with RAID 1 drive pairs. In addition, I backup my DVD rips on another drive.

I use Acronis Workstation 10 with the Universal Recovery option. The Acronis Home 2010 version doesn't have Universal Recovery, which you need to recover the image onto a different mainboard. If your system board fails, you may need the Universal Recovery if you don't have an identical or at least similar mainboard. Just in case I need to recover due to a mainboard failure, I have an identical mainboard/CPU/Memory ready to go as a replacement SageTV computer, currently it used as a general purpose computer.

Dave

[2002cbr600f4i]

Yeah, I ALWAYS partition my system drive to around 20-30GB... That way if I have to reinstall or back up and recover the system it's only 20-30GB vs 750! I'll use the rest of the drive for general storage stuff.

I usually always put the recordings on their own drive - that way the drive head isn't thrashing back and forth between having to deal with OS tasks and keep streaming to/from disk.

Anyhow, things are going better with my setup. Biggest problem now is the GD tuner box comcast gave me - It REFUSES to be controlled by either the HD-PVR's IR Blaster or the USB-UIRT unit I have. No FW on this machine, so that's out unless I buy a card. Newegg has one that is Windows 7 64 bit compatible for $12.99, so I might order that if I can be sure that it'll work to control the cable box. Otherwise I'm going to have to see if I can get comcast to switch the STB out for a different brand box.

Also, I tried to hook up both of the other 750GB drives through my external USB encloser... Turn it on and they just click... no detection in windows at all. Sounds like they're dead. If I get ambitious I'll try putting them into my Mac Pro and see if it can spin them up. Well, at least they're still under warantee with Seagate so I'll just set up for a replacement.

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by davephan

I use Acronis Workstation 10 with the Universal Recovery option. The Acronis Home 2010 version doesn't have Universal Recovery, which you need to recover the image onto a different mainboard.

While the standard version of Acronis True Image Home 2010 doesn't have universal recovery functionality, the plus pack adds it for a pretty reasonable price.

[davephan]

Try using a different set top box remote. The remote that came with my HD cable box worked the cable box, but I could not get SageTV to send those signals. I had an older cable box remote that also worked the HD cable box, plus SageTV could learn and use the codes. Try using LrnHelper to figure out what is going on outside of SageTV.

You're better off getting the USB-UIRT to work than in internal HD-PVR IR.

I didn't know there was a Plus Pack Universal Recovery for the Acronis Home 2010 software. If I knew that, I might have gone that route, which would be a little cheaper.

Dave

[robk]

Originally Posted by davephan

I don't store Videos on my boot/programs drive for two reasons. To separate the activity of the boot/programs drive and the video storage drive(s)

I took your advice - now I use the second 500Gig HD as the default Sage buffer / record drive, and use the 450Gig partition on the drive with the 50 Gig OS partition for storage of downloaded movies, converted videos, etc. Makes sense - now sage has it's own drive...
Good idea-Thanks
Rob

[2002cbr600f4i]

Ok, I've got a controllable HD tuner now and I'm like 90% setup and working right now...

Couple issues:

1) On the machine itself, everything seems fine.

2) On the Hauppauge Media MVPs (Ethernet) SD channels / recordings play fine, HD ones seem to stutter every couple seconds, like pausing.

3) On the Placeshifter clients (Mac, newest version) (LAN or WIFI), SD shows - audio plays fine, but I'm only getting 1 video frame every couple seconds. HD playback IF it works at all, stutters even worse, and eventually craps out.


Ideas? Is my CPU in the server just too slow? Network issues/settings? I'm recording the HD stuff at the worst quality level.

Advice? I did turn off indexing on my recordings drive, and it is formatted for 64K block size.