Duplexing / Multipex and recording quality...help me understand?

[TVHelp]

I have two, dual tuners (hauppage 2250 internal tuners). Prior to switching to NPVR for my recording the quality of my recordings was excellent 99% of the time, and the extra 1% I could confirm came from cable provider issues.

Now I am getting a lot of poor recordings on all channels. All I can tell is that in these cases I noticed that the recording was duplexed/multiplex (if these terms mean something different please explain them), with two to four shows on a single tuner, leaving two tuners open and unused.

Is there a way to tell NPVR to utilize ALL tuners and only double up on one if absolutely necessary??? I think this will improve the quality of my recordings!

Thank you...

[Reddwarf]

Multiplexing has nothing to do with the quality, but are these analog or digital tuners? If analog, you should increase the Bitrate settings in Config.xml, I have a feeling that the bitrate was set higher in gbpvr than it is now.

[sub]

If these are digital recordings, you'll get exactly what the broadcaster is transmitting, regardless of whether is used one tuner or multiple tuners.

In what way do they seem "poor"? Is it breaking up and freezing, or not a great quality picture, or something else?

[mvallevand]

Multiplexing has nothing to do with the quality, but are these analog or digital tuners? If analog, you should increase the Bitrate settings in Config.xml, I have a feeling that the bitrate was set higher in gbpvr than it is now.

I suspect he means multi-rec and his perceived issue with NPVR not using all tuners. My gut reaction based on the missing logs is he needs to apply the dvbfix in XP, without it there are countless similar posts with with multiple tuners.

Martin

[TVHelp]

are these analog or digital tuners?

No, it is digital.

If these are digital recordings, you'll get exactly what the broadcaster is transmitting, regardless of whether is used one tuner or multiple tuners.

In what way do they seem "poor"? Is it breaking up and freezing, or not a great quality picture, or something else?

I am not getting as broadcast since I watched them live and saw no corruptions (freeze ups and digital colored blocks).


Looking back at all the shows I have that have the poor quality I realized it is all in the first few minutes of the show and always for shows that follow other recordings (which is why i suspected the duplication on the tunner as it doubles for the over lap between shows). I now suspect the post processor that is renaming my shows is causing the problem when running while other shows are recordings.

So, is there a plugin that renames shows that I can run on demand instead of via a post processor that will pick-up any recordings that have not yet been renamed?????? This may help. I am disabling the post processor now to see if I see a change in my recordings this week.

[sub]

It is certainly possible if you're running some intensive process that it could interfere with recordings, causing lost data etc.

The only other reason for corruption etc is where you're not supplying a good signal tuner. This would equally affect single or multiple recordings from the same tuner though.

[Reddwarf]

Do you have enough ram in your pc? If not, windows probably will have to do some paging while recording and that is a sure way to kill a recording. Also, I'v seen a lot of the disturbing effects you mention when you have a weak or fluctuating signal.

[mvallevand]

Looking back at all the shows I have that have the poor quality I realized it is all in the first few minutes of the show and always for shows that follow other recordings (which is why i suspected the duplication on the tunner as it doubles for the over lap between shows). I now suspect the post processor that is renaming my shows is causing the problem when running while other shows are recordings.

If you compress and upload your log folder, you'd probably get more help, the impact of post-processing would show pretty clearly? Also by poor recordings do you mean that it plays with lots of pixels or do you mean they don't play at all or are short?

Martin

[TVHelp]

So, is there a plugin that renames shows that I can run on demand instead of via a post processor that will pick-up any recordings that have not yet been renamed?????? This may help. I am disabling the post processor now to see if I see a change in my recordings this week.

I know this is on a delay, but thought I would update. It does seem that the post processor may have been the main contributor to the problem, but not the whole problem so I have left it off. The post processor is running closed caption extractor that appears to cause problems - even though I have plenty of RAM and processor power...

I would really like to find someway to run it on demand instead of automatically after each show. Is there anyway to queue up the post-processor to wait for all recording to be done?

[johnsonx42]

nothing built-in. you can have your postprocessing.bat dump the recording file name to a processing queue file, then write a batch file to iterate through the file names in the queue file, process them and delete the queue when it's done. you can then schedule that processing batch file to run in the wee hours when nothing is going on.