Improved HD PVR Stability with v7?

[jerryt]

Originally Posted by heffneil

So I was watching one channel for a while and switched to a different one. The HD200 just had the circle of death. I turned the box off and back on and go to the menu and when I attempted to go to the guide it wouldn't work. So I restarted the service but it couldn't stop the service. This has happened several times to me with v7. I have tried taskkill.exe which says it kills the process ID but it didn't. I still see it in Task Manager. I am going to have to go upstairs and reboot the machine by holding the power button! Pretty crazy! This is definitely not prime time ready my our standards. I was almost ready to collect all our tv providers STB's and put them in the room for sage. Not now

I had this with intel USB controller, once I went to a NEC controller the HD-PVR no longer was able to lock up the whole computer.

[bulaman]

Originally Posted by jerryt

.....once I went to a NEC controller the HD-PVR .....

I switched to pcie NEC controller and a usbirt and my sage is solid as a rock! Channel changes are perfect, never lose connection to HDPVR. It has been working perfect about a month now.

[heffneil]

Changed channels a couple times with no problems today. Then I went to change the channels and got the spinning wheel of death. Trying to restart the service but I know it is going to require a reboot. I think the PVR works great if you don't have to rely on it too much and change channels often. I am really trying to consolidate all my directv dvr's to one room and distribute tv via the network and set top boxes but I don't think it is going to happen anytime soon.

[heffneil]

Restarted the service but it didn't kill one process. That one is just lingering and will remain until I reboot... going to test the STB now.

[heffneil]

Service came back but no movies were watchable or live tv. Had to reboot the box with the power switch!

Just went to check and all my favorites for Tv were gone! I had to restore from a backup.

[Naylia]

That might be a more serious issue than just your HDPVR.

[heffneil]

Yeah I'm thinking this is s v7 bug. Don't know what to do to crest logs and report the incident. V6 has never locked up on me like this.

[Rico66]

What driver version are you guys using? I don't see that v7 is worse than v6 vs. the hd pvr. But the newest driver version behaves somewhat erratic.

I don't think that Sage has become really better for hd pvr recordings, since the hd pvr can still lock-up. It doesn't report capture errors as quickly as previously, which is good if the hd pvr has not locked up, but it can cause problems if the hd pvr actually has locked up (which is what you have seen above)

[heffneil]

So I had another lock up and I am going to have to truck upstairs to reboot the computer. If you change the channel too often with the HD PVR it the extender will say tuning channel X and the green bar shows and it just stays there. You can restart the extender but its dead in the water. I tried to restart the service and the active process will not die. I can kill the second process which isn't actually being used.

I can start the service but it won't work. I assume the ports are locked up by the service that won't die so the new one will not work properly. This is becoming a real nuisance. I have to assume that most people here are using the HD PVR's to record but not to channel surf. I am trying terribly to consolidate my directv boxes but I still don't think it's going to be possible. I am still running 7.0.11 and need to upgrade to 12 but the release notes didn't indicate any changes in regards to HD PVR usage.

Any thoughts?


Thanks!

Neil

[Rico66]

You can channel surf, but you should always wait until a channel is fully tuned, before switching to the next. That's at least my experience...

[heffneil]

I am not sure if I let the channel before it tune in. You may be right and I didn't allow it to sync up before trying another channel. Still it seems awfully fragile and on top of it there is NO WAY in the world the executable should lock up so badly it can't be killed even with a shutdown of the machine!

[GollyJer]

Originally Posted by bulaman

I switched to pcie NEC controller and a usbirt and my sage is solid as a rock! Channel changes are perfect, never lose connection to HDPVR. It has been working perfect about a month now.

Are you using optical audio or analog audio?

[heffneil]

I installed the NEC controller as well now and I am using optical audio. It works really well. I did have a USBuirt burp yesterday. It didn't tune to channel 501 but channel 1. It was a royal pain in the butt because it was recording so I had to lock up the other HD PVR recording something else and then cancel the original recording and go off of 501 and then back to it. Since it thinks it is on 501 you have to change to a different channel. Kinda confusing. I guess there isn't a more elegant way to handle this?

WAF: my wife was like "what in the world are you doing and do I have to do that to watch a show!?"

[GollyJer]

Firewire is the way to go for channel changing if you can. I never have a channel change issue. My challenge is switching to optical audio. It seems no matter what I do I get lockups 2-3 times a week with optical. With analog, lockups happen maybe once a month.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by GollyJer

Firewire is the way to go for channel changing if you can. I never have a channel change issue.

I agree but the downside is that we can never switch to a 64 bit OS since there are no 64 bit fw drivers.

[GollyJer]

Originally Posted by wayner

I agree but the downside is that we can never switch to a 64 bit OS since there are no 64 bit fw drivers.

Yeah. I had to stick with 32-bit for that exact reason. If your SageTV server is only running Sage then there's really no benefit to 64-bit. It doesn't use more than 1GB of RAM most of the time. If Sage is on a multi-purpose machine the increased RAM may help when working in multiple applications, or running a browser with a ton of tabs open.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by GollyJer

Yeah. I had to stick with 32-bit for that exact reason. If your SageTV server is only running Sage then there's really no benefit to 64-bit. It doesn't use more than 1GB of RAM most of the time.

That's very true but it does mean that you can't use the new version of WHS (aka Vail) which is only 64 bit and several years from now it will seem kind of antiquated to still be stuck with a 32 bit OS with a puny Gig or two of RAM. And we may eventually get to the point where new hardware will not come with 32 bit drivers.

[sic0048]

Originally Posted by heffneil

I installed the NEC controller as well now and I am using optical audio. It works really well. I did have a USBuirt burp yesterday. It didn't tune to channel 501 but channel 1. It was a royal pain in the butt because it was recording so I had to lock up the other HD PVR recording something else and then cancel the original recording and go off of 501 and then back to it. Since it thinks it is on 501 you have to change to a different channel. Kinda confusing. I guess there isn't a more elegant way to handle this?

WAF: my wife was like "what in the world are you doing and do I have to do that to watch a show!?"

Manually change the channel on the STB (using the STB remote)? This is what I usually end up doing.

What is worse is when there is some IR timing issue and I get the dreaded Dishnetwork "Yellow Screen". This happens when you try and view an invalid channel. The only way to get out of it is to do a "recall" which goes back to the previous channel. Simply pressing a new set of channel numbers doesn't work. So when this happens, you can miss a bunch of recordings until you notice the yellow screen. Totally sucks, but it isn't a HD-PVR issue.

[heffneil]

I didn't know 64 bit is an issue and I am running a 64 bit OS. I have tons of memory in my server and I use the box to rip dvd's so I couldn't really swap down to a 32 bit. Also I don't know but I am sure there isnt' a serial port on my STB so what would the firewire port control? Is there a USB to USB control? That would be interesting? Or a Network channel changer for the DirecTV boxes? That sounds interesting.

My problem with using the STB remote is that I have 4 STB's in a rack together far away in another room in the house. I don't even know which box is which tuner and on top of it I have the IR emitters shielded. All around sucky!

Neil

[wayner]

64 bit is only an issue for firewire channel changes because the drivers that allow you to do this, called firestb, were written several years ago and seem to have been abandoned. There is only a 32 bit version of the drivers available. In order to use firewire for channel change you need a firewire port on your PC and a firewire (aka 1394) port on your cable/satellite box. I have Scientific Atlanta/Cisco boxes that have these ports and I believe most Motorola HD cable STBs also have these. I am not so sure if they are available on DirecTV boxes.

Firewire is, at least IMHO, the best way to change channels since it doesn't depend on IR which can be somewhat flakey and you can control many boxes with one firewire card (my boxes have two firewire ports so you can connect PC->Box1, Box1->Box2, etc). You also don't have to beware that one IR emitter is changing channels on the wrong box which can happen with the default zone of a USB-UIRT which blasts the IR signal out to the whole room.