Nova T recording/crashing problems

[Guy]

Hi,

Absolutely love the GBPRVR - fantastic project.

I'm in the process of trying to build a PVR solution using a single PC with a nova T card and a couple of MVPs to distribute around the house. I've managed to get quite a long way, but after a lot of fiddling around I've come unstuck on actually getting stability during timeshift tv or during recordings.

Here's the background:

1. System is:
- AMD64 3000+ with 512mb RAM and SATA HDD
- Nova T card

2. Latest version of GBPVR available on this website; Latest non-beta release of hauppauge MVP software; latest non-beta release of Hauppauge Nova T drivers and win2k software.

3. With this set up everything worked except live TV on the MVP (but it did work on the PC) and any timeshift/recordings (it would produce zero byte file size recordings).

4. I then registered the nov26 2004 versions of PDmpgmux.ax and mpgmux.ax. This then got live TV working on the MVP, but changing channel on either the MVP or the PC resulted in the screen freezing on the first channel (although the overlay would correctly show the channel I was changing to). Recovering from the screen freeze simply involved pressing escape to go back to the main menu and re-entering liveTV

5. I then made two changes: I uninstalled the Intervideo CSS mpg filter for Hauppauge, and changed the config in GBPVR to use overlay manager instead of VMR. This seemed to solve the problem of channel changing (although the overlay no longer comes up on channel change & only ever appears when 'watch' is selected from the EPG). I don't know which of the two changes that I made solved the channel change problem (but will experiment tonight)

6. So far so good. The last two remaining problems I have is timeshift and recording. In both cases the system occasionally starts recording to disc OK, with CPU usage running at between 5% and 20% but invariably after a couple of minutes the CPU usage suddenly shoots up to 100% and the system effectively locks up and becomes non responsive (I have to keep the task manager open and stab away at the ending the GBPVRrecording service process and wait a few minutes until the CPU gets around to processing the end process request!. The file that gets recorded appears to be fine, at least until the system locks. At other times the system shoots to 100% usage straight away on hitting pause/record and doesn't record anything to disc.

7. I'm not sure where to go next in trying to solve this problem. The other problem - much less severe, but may be related is that the system is generally not enourmously stable when watching live TV, particularly through the MVP - it works, but after watching for a bit, or channel changing a lot, it will eventually hang and disconnect from the server.

Any help at all on where to go next would be enourmously appreciated. I will try and extract the log files tonight if I can reproduce a situation where the recording starts ok, but then after a while locks up the pc.

I have a donation on the way if I can get this cracked! Actually it's such a brilliant project, there's a donation on the way anyway....

One quick question - is it likely to make any difference at all if I install an MPEG hardware decoder/encoder? I don't have one, but could beg borrow or steal one if it makes a difference.

Many thanks in advance

guy.









, plus I have registered PDmpgmux.ax and mpgmux.ax

[Darx-starz]

Have you got AV running? What service goes 100% is it system? If you say copy a dvd VOB file to your HD does it copy ok without failing? Can you play the VOB in WMP? Whats your defrag report look like (defrag c: -a -v)

Maybe you have a general machine problem that is nothing to do with the pvr software. Anything in eventvwr?

[Guy]

Hi Darx Starz

It's the GBPVRRecordingService.exe process that goes to 100% CPU usage. Copying large chunky video files is fine. Recording mpegs via Hauppauge WinTV2000 is fine as well.

HDD is brand new (bought for PVR only) - so fragmentation shouldn't be an issue.

I've just looked at eventvwr - it is showing the following error that appears every time I boot up the computer. The apache service is only used by GBPVR on my pc (I don't use apache for anything else) - could this have anything to do with it?:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Apache Service
Event Category: None
Event ID: 3299
Date: 09/03/2005
Time: 22:05:39
User: N/A
Computer: VIDEOSERVER
Description:
The Apache service named reported the following error:
>>> [Wed Mar 09 22:05:39 2005] [notice] Disabled use of AcceptEx() WinSock2 API.

I've now also noticed in the system section that some programme (which I can't identify) is being denied access to DCOM (whatever that is - I'm totally lost now) and is trying about every 30 seconds to access it.

Give me 30 mins - I'm going to explore this one on microsoft.com.....

[sub]

GB-PVR doesnt use Apache.

[Guy]

ah - for some reason I thought it did...now I have no idea what is using Apache on the machine (the mediamvp?)...anyway I seem to have got to the bottom of all the error messages in eventvwr - the nvidia hardware firewall drivers were behaving oddly. I've now totally uninstalled all things related to firewalls and now the eventvwr log appears error and warning free. Unfortunately this hasn't, now unsuprisingly, had any effect on the crash on recording in GBPVR.