MVP locks up on "Live TV"

[fausto]

Did some more testing last night. I changed over from recording to local harddrive to NAS and back again. It did not seem to make much difference to watching LiveTV. I tried pausing LiveTV and then watching a 20-30 seconds behind real time. Again not much difference. I also tried the NIC onboard processor registry tweak. Again no noticeable difference with it enabled or disabled.

BTW, I'm not getting crashes any more (who knows why) just very occasional audio glitches and blocky video jerks. The analogy which springs to mind is the old anti-skip buffer on portable CD players. Is there an equivalent buffer between the PC mux and the MVP decoder? If so, can the buffer size be changed?

[drbenjamin]

Hi guys

Reading through this thread, I thought I'd offer up my 2 cents. Not looking to be contrary here, but I am running a P3 1GHz with 512MB RAM and Windows 2000 professional. This machine has no trouble serving up 2 different shows to my MVPs while recording a third, and can also playback live TV on one MVP while serving a second show to the other one. Comskip is frequently running while we are watching (because it takes 15 min for a 1/2 hr show!), and sometimes the disk defragmenter is running. For me, the key to this performance was running wires to both MVPs, which are plugged into the same router as the P3. I tried a wireless setup, and even though it seemed to give ample throughput I experienced frequent crashes on that MVP. I also did the NIC offload mod described here, but that alone wasn't enough.
I have to say, I am really pleased with gbPVR's performance here. It's an old machine I was going to toss out, but I now expect to use it for a few more years. Of course, it is completely incapable of running gbPVR directly (i.e. watching TV on the computer monitor) but with the MVP's no problem.

[fausto]

I am running a P3 1GHz with 512MB RAM and Windows 2000 professional. This machine has no trouble serving up 2 different shows to my MVPs while recording a third, and can also playback live TV on one MVP while serving a second show to the other one.

Cheers drbenjamin . That's great information and it gives me hope.
My single MVP is connected to my PC via a switch and a router (all wired) and everything plays fine except for liveTV. I get video and audio glitches. These glitches occur even if I pause and then watch "live" slightly timeshifted. The analogy that occurs to me is like "burn-proof" cd writing and portable cd players for joggers, I need to lengthen the buffer which must exist between the mux and the network driver. I'm probably not using the right names for everything but you know what I mean.

If one of the senior forum members could help with a block diagram or description of what is going on, where, and in which order, between the mux and the MVP, that would be a great help. Here's hoping.

p.s. What value of "MVP LiveTV pre-play delay" are you using, drbenjamin?

[drbenjamin]

I can double check later tonight, but I remember dropping the MVP pre-delay down to ~300 msec, I found the default value to be too long when flipping through channels. I remember that below 300 msec it got sketchy, sometimes the MVP would crash, but 300 seemed fine.
It's peculiar that only LiveTV is giving you trouble - kind of rules out network contention or hardware problems at the MVP. I set my LiveTV buffer directory to be on the same hard drive as where all my recordings go. Is your the same? If you're using your system drive for the LiveTV buffer, perhaps that drive is getting hammered during playback (maybe some swapping or other disk i/o)

D

[mvallevand]

drbenjamin, do you have a digital or analog capture device?

Martin

[drbenjamin]

I have a WinTV PVR-250, an analog device. I have bought a second one which arrived 2 days ago but the machine records non-stop in the evenings, so I haven't been able to put it in yet! Also, I just checked and my preplay buffer is 300msec.

[mvallevand]

I have a WinTV PVR-250, an analog device.

I thought as much. I've found analog works much better on older machines and it is in keeping with the Hauppauge minimum specs for their two capture cards too. (733 Mhz vs 1.5 GHz).

Martin

[fausto]

Defragging the local disc had a big effect. No more audio glitches just the occasional flash of "blockiness" in parts of the picture. I'm still playing with the delays to see if I can get rid of that too. I only have the one disc drive on this old system. It's set up with a C: XP system partition and a D: data partition. Would I be better off with two real separate discs?