newbie - Recording Unplayable?

[rwmech]

I've been plugging away at this for some time and I feel very close to getting this working.

I have an Technisat Air2PC card (generation 1) which works great. I'm pulling in my ATSC signal fine over the air. I do NOT have any analog cards but I do have the NVIDIA Decoder using the GeForce 5200 MPEG2 decoder. Live TV seems to work just great.

Where I'm having a problem though is in recording. When I record, it seems to "record" but then the .MPG or the dvb-ms file is unplayable. Doesnt play through GBPVR, and it doesnt play through windows media player. It's as if it's saving data, just in the wrong format.

I've tried a couple of the multiplexers including Cyberlink and Microsoft (i'm running XP MCE with SP2) without any luck at all. I'm presuming that this is a mux issue, but not sure how to resolve it.

If I understand correctly that ATSC is broadcasing MPEG2, why doesnt this save directly to the disk to read the stream later? I wanted full HD quality anyhow.

Any help on this would be great. I've checked out the wiki faq, which doesnt help and I cant seem to find anything else in the forums describing this problem.

Thanks.

[sub]

If I understand correctly that ATSC is broadcasing MPEG2, why doesnt this save directly to the disk to read the stream later? I wanted full HD quality anyhow

It does, sort of. Read on...

MPEG2 content comes in one of two containers:

(1) MPEG2 Program Streams, which are what most users are familiar with. These usually have the file extension .mpg, and are what is produced by analog cards like PVR150's etc, or downloaded from the net. These contain one video stream, and typically one audio stream.

(2) MPEG2 Transport Streams, which are mostly used in broadcasting (but also for some other things). This is what is used by ATSC and DVB. Each frequency transmits a signal transport stream, which is made up of multiple audio and video streams (multiple channels). They're also broken into thousands of little 188 byte packets to accomodate the occassion packet loss that typically occurs in these TV situations.

Both of these containers carry the exact same type of audio/video packets (PES packets), but they're just packaged up a different way.

When you record with GB-PVR, it uses the mux filter (and Microsoft Demultiplexer) to convert from a transport stream to a program stream, storing only those audio/video streams associated with the channel you want to record. In effect, it is storing the original MPEG2 content (PES packets) that were sent, but its having to build the new Program Stream container to hold it. This is what the mux filter is responsible for.

[sub]

Where I'm having a problem though is in recording. When I record, it seems to "record" but then the .MPG or the dvb-ms file is unplayable. Doesnt play through GBPVR, and it doesnt play through windows media player. It's as if it's saving data, just in the wrong format.

I've tried a couple of the multiplexers including Cyberlink and Microsoft (i'm running XP MCE with SP2) without any luck at all. I'm presuming that this is a mux issue, but not sure how to resolve it.

Can you reproduce the problem, then zip and attach the logs so I can take a look. Also post the output from MuxChecker.

[rwmech]

Will do as soon as I get home. Thanks for the clarification on how this all works.

[rwmech]

Here are the logs. I tried using the microsoft mux, would not play back. Cannot also do timeshift either.

GB-PVR has detected the following multiplex filters on your machine:

Found: CyberLink MPEG Muxer
FILE: C:\WINDOWS\system32\MpgMux.ax
VERSION: 5.0.1307



If you're running WinXP SP1 or higher, you will also be able to use the built-in DVR-MS mux filter

[stefan]

I tried using the microsoft mux, would not play back
[snip]
Found: CyberLink MPEG Muxer

So, did you try using the cyberlink mux? What happens then?

[rwmech]

I've tried both muxes with no avail. Here are some additional logs. I wasnt able to re-download my own posts of logs.

Here is a breakdown of what i've tried.

Cyberlink mux - Records, but no playback
Microsoft Mux - Records, but no playback

I notice that the filesizes of the recordings seem resonable. I had a 4 minute recording that was rougly 80 megs in size. I was able to open it in media player as the .mpg but the playback was blank. I havent had any luck in replaying the microsft files through media player.

Live TV is great, it displays fine with no jitter now that I'm running the NVIDIA codec for Video only. My soundcard is not compatible with the driver so I use the microsoft decoder for sound. Live TV comes across just fine. I use overlay mode instead of VMR because there is a performance gain, and since my TV is 16:9 I can reformat the picture as I see fit anyhow so it's unnecessary for me to have that as an option.

I'm really enjoying gbpvr if I could just get this recoding issue fixed I'd like to start developing some plug ins for it.

[rwmech]

Any luck with the logs?

[rwmech]

Well I'm not sure what I did, but I got the recoding working. Guess if you try enough combinations it'll eventually work.

Thanks for the help.

[rwmech]

Ok, I take it back, it's not working again. here is what I know.

It is WAS intermittent as to when I would be able to record. Now it seems I consistently get a 6KB file, and no recording. Doesnt matter what or on what channel.

Any ideas? I've posted logs but at this point I'm wondering if I'll ever get this to work reliably