MVP Hangs during live TV

[B1ackh013]

I'll start from the beginning since I've done a lot of my own troubleshooting so far.

I installed GBPVR about a year ago, but I've mainly used it for watching live TV over the net. I'm not in the habit of watching TV on my PC when I'm at home.

A few days ago, I decided to buy a couple of Wireless MVPs so that I could use GBPVR on a daily basis.

I installed the latest version of GBPVR (1.0.8). I set up my new MVPs and configured them to connect to my 802.11g network...no problems. I configured GBPVR with all of my EPG, the MVP servers, etc. In the mean time, I saw the note about the dongle not working with Vista, so I downloaded the mcmvp dongle.

This is where the trouble started. I went out to the tv and booted up the mvp. Every couple of button pushes on the remote and it would hang. Sometimes, it would hang so bad that I would have to reboot the mvp. This also happened about every 30 seconds of watching any kind of video.

My first thought was that every time I went back to my PC, the screen saver was on. For some reason, the pictures screen saver in Vista really takes a lot of resources, so I disabled it. No change.

Next, I reinstalled GBPVR completely...completely deleting the directory after install to ensure a clean reinstall. I tried both the default dongle and the mcmvp dongle...no change on either of them.

Next, I completely uninstalled GBPVR again, this time installing version 0.95. After setting all of the configurations again, I went out to the TV. The problems were much less frequent. However, after certain amounts of time, the mvp would reboot. It appeared that maybe it was losing connection to the wireless network. So, I ran some cables. Now they are connected at 100Mbps.

This is where I am at now. There is no more rebooting. If I don't press buttons too fast (eg. scrolling quickly through the guide) then it won't freeze. If I do and it freezes, it is only for a few seconds...no big deal. However, about every minute or two while watching live tv, the video freezes for about 30 seconds. It almost seems like when you are watching a video online and it has to rebuffer. I increased the live tv buffer to 5500, but there was no change. I'm not positive yet whether this happens with pre-recorded shows. I tried recording the show and starting to watch it about 10 minutes later (10 minutes of buffer, right?), but that didn't help.

Some PC info:

Dell XPS 410
Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz 4M cache (E6700)
4GB Ram
320MB 7200Rpm 3GBps SATA HDD
128MB nVidia GForce 8300GS
PVR-150 x 2
Windows Vista Home Premium

[mvallevand]

Your problems with mvpmc sounds like what I see with the Hauppauge dongle. Do you see the blue mvpmc.org logo when it boots? Also make sure you are running the dongle from the survivor guide or the alpha dongle. 0.3.3 isn't recommended with gbpvr. You can find the date of the dongle on the About screen on the main menu

If you post your logs that would help a lot.

Martin

[B1ackh013]

Yes, I could see the mvpmc.org logo when it booted. I tried all of the available mvpmc dongles...they all produced the same results. Just to mention, I'm not using the mvpmc dongle now since I am using the 0.95 version of GBPVR instead of the 1.0.8.

I'm at work now, but I will post the logs when I get home.

[mvallevand]

Based on what you say now, I think either there is a firewall issue, or you have the Hauppauge services running.

Martin

[B1ackh013]

Nope. The only firewall I have is my hardware firewall which is not between the PC and the MVP. I don't use any software firewalls, including the Windows firewall. I never installed the Hauppauge software. Didn't even get the disk out.

Thanks for your help!

[sub]

zip and attach the MVP* logs and I'll take a look.

[B1ackh013]

Hmmm...interestingly enough...the problem has gone away. I think I know the culprit.

When my wife tried to use the PC this morning it wouldn't respond. Vista has some memory management issues still to work out. After a reboot, everything appears to be okay.

Leave it to Microsoft to create a program that will run out of memory in a system with 4 GB.

I've attached the logs just in case there is something of interest. Why are there only logs from today? Does it delete old ones automatically?

[sub]

Hmmm...interestingly enough...the problem has gone away.

Ok, cool.

Why are there only logs from today? Does it delete old ones automatically?

It only keeps three historic logs. It'll start a new log when you start the software, or when the logs is decided to be too big.

[mvallevand]

Vista has some memory management issues still to work out.

You might be in luck with this update for MS today, I'm crossing my fingers and giving it a try.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938979

Also I saw from your logs, that you are actually having success with 0.99.12 and not ".95" This version does use a Vista compatible dongle unlike 0.99.5/1.0.8 which makes a lot more sense to me.

Martin

[B1ackh013]

Martin

I actually just found that today myself. I installed it, but haven't seen a whole lot of difference so far.

In fact, it seems that I jumped the gun on saying that it was fixed. As soon as I decided to watch the baseball game, it started again.

Since I was having the same problems with the old version as the new, I decided to go back. In fact, it really started going crazy. All of my config settings were reset to default, it started hanging a lot, sometimes wasn't tuning properly, etc. So, I am now using v1.0.8 with the mvpmc dongle.

The menu and pre-recorded shows all seem to work fine. The issue comes down to live tv. Maybe the mvp just doesn't like baseball ;-)

Anyway, there was a lot of freezing and restarting and sound getting thrown off from the video and all kinds of fun stuff. I've attached all of the logs.