swopped ati 9250 to nv 5200fx: now freezing all the time

[arjay]

I was using an ati radeon 9250 in my media centre with win xp mce edition. It worked fine with win mce until directx 9.0 (not supported by this card) I bought an nvidia 5200fx and while I was waiting I went back to using gbpvr. I liked it so much, I wanted to stick with it! Problem is that I installed the 5200fx and now gbpvr freezes all the time - watching live tv or recording. It goes ok for about 20-30 minutes then just dies. needs a complete reboot to start again. I have updated to the latest drivers from the nvidia site but still the same problem.

I have a 1.7 mobile pentium chip with 1 gig of memory. Gbpvr, media portal and mce all ran fine before. I suspect a driver problem. Could someone with a 5200 tell me what drivers they are using and where i could get them from?

Thanks

Richard

[capone]

I had that problem, but never nailed it down to the vid card, since it only happened watching TV (and not recordings or other videos). It also wan't nearly that regular. It was sometimes random, and sometimes at a program time change (I watch in timeshift mode)

I think I'm using 93.71.

[pBS]

sounds like you need the patch for memory use, look on the survival guide page in info forum...seems there was a bug that ate memory every time you used the osd, and wouldn't give it back...so you'd eventually run out...

[arjay]

OK - I have upgraded to 9912 from 9905 and installed the patch for excessive memory usage. Still freezes after an hour or so of recording films, but seems to be ok when playing tv.

Just a thought - can someone help re how to set the buffer or whatever it is called, for how long gbpvr records to hard disk before wiping it if that makes sense?

Cheers

RJ

[sub]

Just a thought - can someone help re how to set the buffer or whatever it is called, for how long gbpvr records to hard disk before wiping it if that makes sense?

GB-PVR doesnt really work this way. When timeshift mode it records shows based on the times in the guide, and switches to the next show at the completion of that recording's playback. I dont think your problem is related to this.

If it freezes your machine or requires a reboot, its gotta be a driver or hardware instability.

[arjay]

sub - thanks for the clarification. I seemed to remember when I tried another program (teamportal perhaps) there was a setting for this. I must be wrong. Several times, now, I have started recording a film and then decided to watch it while it was still recording at around, for example, the 20 minute mark. However, it would suddenly stop after - say - exact 59 minutes, when actually it should have carried on until the end of the film at 95 minutes. I set it to record by clicking quick record on the film in the guide.

Now I have also had a couple of examples where the film shows as having recorded for the correct time under recordings but when I go to watch it, it might be only 30 seconds or 2-3 minutes long.

As to locking up - it seems now as if it is only gbpvr that freezes, not the actual machine. I can kill gbpvr by using ALT-CTRL-DEL and killing the application, and windows carries on working fine. It doesn't lock up when using other (non-pvr) software.

I will try it with just watching a few of the films I have already recorded and see if it stops unexpectedly that way.

Thanks for a great piece of software - I still think it is excellent - just need to get to the bottom of this problem though.

Richard

[arjay]

sub - this looks like a problem with the pvr150 driver. I reinstalled media portal as an experiement and got the same problem there. I tried a couple of different haup drivers for the pvr150 but they made it worse. I have rolled back to a 2004 one which is slightly better but, for example, mediaportal freezes within 20-30 seconds of trying to watch live tv. However, it plays recordings just fine. GBPVR is actually more forgiving!!

Leavve it with me. I am going to try a few more things oput and then report back.

Thanks for your help so far

Richard

[HtV]

Do a search for 150 and timestamp and you'll find the right drivers + the registry settings needed.

[arjay]

htv - thanks for this tip. I am going to give it a go - can't do any harm.

However, i think i have another issue as well. I can see that the timestamp issue will mean a film recorded for, say, 2 hours, will show up as only 1 hour. This is certainly happening to me.

But in my case I also have this situation: I start recording a 3 hour film then decide to watch it after 20 minutes or so. That goes ok to start with but at 1 hour (two hours short of the actuial end) the recording just stops. Could this still be the timestamp issue? I have read up on it in the wiki but am not sure I fully understand all the ramifications.

Will keep you posted.

Thanks again

arjay