CPU spike followed by Crash

[morpher99]

Hi all,

First of all, awesome program.

Here's the situation. I'm using indoor ATSC antenna plugged into a HVR-1600. I can get most channels pretty well, but every now and then when I'm on a channel which seems to be getting too poor reception, the computer spikes to 100% CPU usage, often followed by the program crashing.

What can I do to A) figure out the best placement of my antenna to get better reception, B) stop the spiking and crashing.

THANKS!!!

PS - Does anyone know how to set up the remote so that when I press "TV" GB-PVR and not WinTV opens?

[Deusxmachina]

What can I do to A) figure out the best placement of my antenna to get better reception, B) stop the spiking and crashing.

Best antenna placement is pretty much as high as possible with as clear a line as possible. Knowing where to place it is easy, getting it to that position is the harder part. Going through a window can help since it's glass and not insulation or siding or brick.

Put your full address into antennaweb.org, and it will show the exact miles and degrees of the stations from you. It will also help you choose an antenna. If all your channels are high (above 13 or so), life is easier. If you have a station in the VHF range, you may wind up needing two antennas.

[morpher99]

I couldn't get an outdoor antenna, (renting), but I do go though a window basically, and that more or less works. My question is, why does the CPU spike sometimes on bad channels, any why does program crash because of it?

Thanks

[sub]

To be honest, its hard for me to guess how it will behave when there is severe signal problems. For the most part GB-PVR tries to cope gracefully with this, but I dont have access to ATSC or QAM signals, so its possible there is something in there which isnt coping when this happens - its not something I've been able to test.

[morpher99]

My impression is that it's trying to decrypt what is the equivalent of a corrupted packet. Is there any way by looking at the logs to see more about this? Or perhaps turn off such a decryption?

[sub]

It depends where the problem is happening. There is a lot of third party components involved in viewing TV in this type of setup. The data flows directly out of the card, into the Microsoft Demultiplexor, which breaks up the data and passes it to the video decoder and audio decoder and into a GB-PVR filter. The only way I'd be able to change this behaviour you're seeing is if the problem was occuring in the GB-PVR filter, but its at the end of the chain and sees the data after a lot of other components have already had a go at it.

Unfortunately I dont see this behaviour with my DVB digital devices, so it would be very difficult for me to identify what exactly is happening and how to fix it.

Your best bet is probably to disable any channels that have marginal signal strength.