To have or have not: HD-PVR

[flavius]

I'm thinking about finally getting one, but I'm still having trust issues.

[darcilicious]

can't say that i blame you. it took my quite some time to get mine sorted out -- the only errors i get now i'm fairly confident i can blame on poor/dirty signal from the set-top box and the occasional incorrect channel (but i'm using the built-in ir blaster too, which is the least optimal route). my full-on lock-ups are few and far between these days...

[BobPhoenix]

Haven't had any problems with mine for better than 6 months now. It is in "It's just works" mode since I upgraded my system, OS and added an NEC USB controller.

[will]

I have my two HD-PVRs are working very well on an XP/2003 system. I feel like the later version of the drivers fixed most issues SageTV users had (also 7.x upgraded helped a TON).

The only time they lock up is when the cable box does a reset/update at 4 a.m. about once every month or two. I solved this problem by purchasing a network controllable power switch and writing a batch script that can turn off my HD-PVRs, then my cable boxes, wait 15 minutes for the cable boxes to re-boot then turn on the HD-PVRs.

I still need to find a way to automate the triggering of the script (I know there is a program out there called SageTV Alert but I haven't looked into it too much). I'm considering writing a program that can find a free time slot between 5 a.m. and 8 a.m. and power cycle the HD-PVRs daily or every other day just to be pro-active.

[stuckless]

I have 2 HD-PVRs running under linux... it was literally plug and play... not driver installs, etc, they just work. I used to have recording issues "Halt Detected in Recording", but turned out that was related to the power adapter being faulty. Since I've changed the power adapters, I haven't missed a recording.

[vividweb]

The three I have have worked flawlessly for a long time. Took a little bit to get it going, I still can't use SPDIF. Going to try that again soon and see what happens with the latest drivers.

[fidget]

I have two, a rev D1 and F1. The biggest problem that I have is that I can't get the D1 rev to work with the latest firmware (I have them at different firmware revs because of that). For me, SPDIF works without any problems.

[jchiso]

I have a total of three and they all have worked flawlessly from Day One. I capture at 720p with SPDIF. One is on a standalone Sage system with a Dual-core Atom processor, and the other two are on an encoding-only server with an AMD Duron running XP with 1GB RAM. I've made hundreds of HD-PVR captures on the latter system and have yet to experience any failures ...

[Skirge01]

Who will be your TV provider? If it's DirecTV, you stand a very good chance of getting this working.

[Skybolt]

Originally Posted by Skirge01

Who will be your TV provider? If it's DirecTV, you stand a very good chance of getting this working.

Why would the provider have anything to do with this?

[WellThen]

Originally Posted by vividweb

The three I have have worked flawlessly for a long time. Took a little bit to get it going, I still can't use SPDIF. Going to try that again soon and see what happens with the latest drivers.

Like vividweb, my only problem was with SPDIF - sometimes I'd get audio, sometimes I'd get about 1 second of crackling noise, and then no audio. With analog audio, I've never missed a recording.

I'm also planning to try SPDIF again. If someone would post the process for upgrading the drivers/firmware for the HD-PVR, it would be very helpful. Also, how do you get back to the old drivers/firmware if the new one turns out to be less reliable?

[Skirge01]

Originally Posted by Skybolt

Why would the provider have anything to do with this?

Most of the issues I read about are due to irregularities in the stream from the provider. The HD-PVR seems to be more tolerable of the DirecTV stream, again, based on my interpretation of all the posts I've read.

[mistergq]

HD PVR (usb one) works well. I use firewire for tuning and the new version seems to just work. I do nightly reboots, but I cannot say if the Hauppauge driver is causing the problem or if it is something else.

I had an original one and I think it was starting to fail before I sold it. I sold my original ones to get the colossus. With fios, the audio would get out of sync with SPDIF. I then switched back to HD PVR because I could not deal with the out sync issue as well as I had an issue where the Colossus stopped working. It became clear that I was going to have to install reinstall windows to get the cards working again. That was not a valid reason for me to reinstall windows.

So I ended up purchasing two new HD PVRs. They work great.

If I had to do over again, I would have bought 1 HD PVR and got 2 HD Primes. The reason I want the 1 HD PVR is for video on demand.

[DRB]

Originally Posted by Skirge01

Most of the issues I read about are due to irregularities in the stream from the provider. The HD-PVR seems to be more tolerable of the DirecTV stream, again, based on my interpretation of all the posts I've read.

Another reason is with Directv you can get rid of the ir blaster and use HTTP tuning.

DRB

[Skirge01]

Originally Posted by DRB

Another reason is with Directv you can get rid of the ir blaster and use HTTP tuning.

DRB

Yep. Between that and serial tuning, the upsides are strong for DirecTV.

[Fluffdaddy]

Works for me, most of the time that is

when I had just two it was almost 100% when I added 2 more for a total of 4 all hell broke loose. 2-3 pvr's seems to be the sweet spot for me

Moving on to cable card this or next weekend when I have the free time and the wife is out of the house.

[sic0048]

I've always had a pretty strong running HD-PVR, but I would get an issue about once every week or two that would require power cycling the HD-PVR. I bought an NEC USB card, but never got around to installing it until a few weeks ago. I had to reinstall my WHS OS due to running out of sys partition space and put the NEC card in while I was doing that. I haven't had a single issue since getting the machine back up and running a few weeks ago. System is more stable now than it ever has been.

[wayner]

I have two that have worked fine for over two years. I did have a failed power supply which seems very common. I use SPDIF with no problems. I initially was running WinXP, then WHSv1 and now Win7Pro 32 bit.