choppy recordings on ota antenna, need help diagnosing

[briantho]

hi, nextpvr has been stable for quite some time, but recently I've been having an issue with recordings being choppy. NOt sure what the issue is yet. hardware hasn't changed, and ota antenna is still in good shape. I'll attach logs and my setup below. I would really like help diagnosing this issue. Sometimes the recording is fine, sometimes it cuts out and skips 10-20 seconds, and at times the recording is pixelated, and then goes back to normal. Moving the recording to a different drive, and playing it using VLC produces the same choppy result. 

Anyway, without furtherer ado, here is my setup. 
Dell Inspirion Desktop with a i7 3770 cpu,
24gb ddr3 ram
NO GPU, only Igpu
2 Hauppauge 2250 tuners + 1 Hauppauge usb 850 tuner
Several Hard drives for recordings of various sizes and manufactures. (sizes from 500gb to 4tb) 
Windows 10 pro 22h2 
Samsung sata ssd for the OS
and a roof mounted ota antenna with a good "channel master" amplifier 
NextPVR 6.1.1.221106  6.1.1.2211066.1.1.221106.

I'll try uploading a copy of a "choppy" recording later.

[sub]

Yeah, might be best to supply a sample recording.

With recordings from a digital tuner, NextPVR will just give you an exact copy of what is received form the tuner, so likely any issue is reception related. ie weak signal, or antenna has moved or something like that

[artmetz]

I had an issue with weak channels/recordings and turns out removing 2 splitters fixed the issue. I was feeding live signals to other tv's in the house.
Art

[briantho]

Here is a sample recording.  when playing the first few seconds notice it skips, then skips again at around a minute. this is a news recording that was taken yesterday. 

Do you think it might be an antenna issue? is there any way in nextpvr to check the tuner signal strength, or via another program? In the mean time I'll go check to make sure the amplifier is getting proper power. I am using splitters, but the amplifier should be enough to compensate for the loss on them. Also, this setup has been working fine for over 2 years, the problem just started recently.

[artmetz]

I would temporarily eliminate the splitters as a test. Mine deteriorated over time as well. I have an amplifier at the TV end of the cable run to feed the PC and TV. I picked up a few more channels after removing the splitters.
The HDHomeRun software has a signal strength as some part of the channel scan I think. I haven't used it for a while. You might check the Hauppauge software to see if it shows the strength.
Art

[mvallevand]

That would be signal related (too weak, too strong, antenna direction, tree, coax connections etc). Amplifiers can't fix bad connection loss.

One time I had squirrels eat my coax things can go wrong over time.

Note that you can get a file called CutChunk on the wiki which allows passing much smaller files, usually we don't need the whole recording.

Martin

[sub]

Yeah, it's definitely signal errors.

I can see continuity errors in that file, which happen when packets are missing entirely.

I can also see TEI errors, which are set when the tuner receives corrupt packets.

[briantho]

Hi, i just thought i'd share an update. There were 2 possible problems, not sure which one it was, but i believe it's fixed. Only time (and more recordings) will tell. 1 was the amplifier was turned off, thanks to it being on the same circuit as a breaker that was turned off, and i didn't realize it. Also, I had an issue with a f*** up rogue VM, that was using 100 percent of my cpu. I've fixed the VM issue, and now the cpu usage is down to like 5 % when recording. I doubt the cpu being pegged was the issue, but i just thought i'd share that. I'll keep testing, and report back if the amplifier was the problem or not.