choppy recording

[SteveTyrakowski]

Hi,

I've got 2 PVR-150s in the server. I noticed a few recordings have sections where the playback is very fast and choppy for short stretches of time.

My guess is that the system may have slowed down during recording when I copied a video file to a different computer so I could burn to DVD. I don't remember for sure if I was doing that at the time of the recording. Could this cause the 150 to not be able to save to the disk fast enough?

If that is the likely cause, is there any way to do a file copy to a different computer that goes slower so it does not interfere with the recording?

[colin]

I would imagine it was a disk I/O issue and I would suggest avoiding disk intensive work on the device whilst a recording is in progress.

I doubt there is much that can be done as we are limited with our choice of filesystems under windows.

Tipstir may have suggestions on this,

cheers,
Colin.

[Stimpy]

I do this all the time, (copy files to my upstairs PC for editing and DVD burning while another show is recording on the downstairs PVR PC) and I have never had any problems with the recorded files. I'm using a fairly cheap system: Duron 800 MHz CPU and a Maxtor 200 GB hard drive 7200 rpm.

My only guess would be that you don't have DMA or UDMA mode enabled on your hard drive and you are using PIO mode.  Try going into control panel, system, device manager, IDE/ATAPI controllers, primary IDE channel (or secondary IDE channel) and under advanced settings make sure that the current transfer mode is "ultra DMA mode" and not "PIO mode"

If that still doesn't help, then I suppose a "slow copy" program would be the solution and it's fairly easy to write one.

[SteveTyrakowski]

I checked and it is running at UltraDMA. The CPU is a Sempron 2200+ and the drive is a 160gb Western Digital with 8mb cache.

If copying the file while recording is not (or should not be) to blame, any other ideas what might have caused that?

[Darx-starz]

Hi. It may be worth running up taskmgr whilst you are recording something. At the same time transfer a file. This will give you an idea what the problem is. You are using FTP are you not? If not it may be a good idea as Winblows SMB file transfer is a bit tardy. This may be why your IO is getting pounded