4rth tuner issue

[syncpuls]

Just bought a Hauppauge pvr500 to add to my 2003 server running GBPVR that already holds a pvr350 and a pvr250.

I didn't get it to work, so of course first thing I did was dig into the forum. Initially I thought it was the pvr500 that caused the problem, but after re-installing card by card, starting with the pvr 500 I did find that everything works just fine until a 4rth card is added. Used seperately, the cards seems to work fine.

I see a lot of people describing the same issues I have, often blaming the PVR500, but it seems something else is wrong; the pvr500 just happens to add two devices so it will show the problem sooner.

What happens is that, when recording 4 sources, one will record 0 bytes (sounds familiar?) and it seems another one creates a quite large file (450Mb) very fast, but that file cannot be played back. The other two sources seem OK. Further more the whole systems becomes unresponsive, as if some task is using a lot of processor time.

Additionally, when testing of course I do not record a whole show on 4 sources, so I tend to cancel them after a while. There another issue reveals itself: one show will not be cancelled. In fact even after rebooting the computer it can't be cancelled.

I have already replaced the NativeUtilities.dll and added the line: <AutoDetectEncoder>false</AutoDetectEncoder> to my config.xml as suggested elswhere in the forums.

I am able to reproduce the issues. Right now I have disabled one of my cards so the system works fine with the 3 remaining sources, but of course it would be great if the 4rth source works OK too. As mentioned; I see some other people have similar problems, so this may be a more generic problem?

Any suggestions as to what I might try next?

[reboot]

My answer was to install the cards in different slots, until they all worked properly.
Starting with the slot secondmost down, from your AGP slot, as the top slot usually shares it's IRQ with the AGP.
Depending on the BIOS, every second slot could share an IRQ, so from the top down, I installed things in slot 2, 3, and 6 (If you have that many).
Check the BIOS, and you can sometimes manually assign IRQ's to various slots. This helps a lot, and disable unused IRQ's in BIOS at the same time.
Things like serial ports are virtually extinct, so why have two of them using IRQ's if you have no serial devices (not SATA)?
Disable the printer if you don't have one connected...How many have a printer connected to a PVR?
This will free up IRQ's 2, 3, and usually 5 or 7 for using for your cards.
Once I got the IRQ sharing issues sorted, the driver install went smoother, and the cards all worked.
It seems that tuning/capture software may get confused, when choosing a card to record from, if it's IRQ is the same as another card, yet XP is supposed to sort this out, it doesn't always do it well.
There's another workaround in the registry, but I forget exactly how.

[syncpuls]

Thanks for the tips Reboot. It did indeed seems to at least help a bit, as I no longer seem to experience the issue where I could not cancel a show from recording!

I did free up as much IRQ's as you mentioned, unfortunately I have a ASUS P4P800 motherboard, that has only 3 PCI slots (and built-in VGA).

The IRQ's are not shared though; I have 17, 18, 21 and 22 taken by the cards, and Windows 2003 does not report issues.

I happen to have some spare hardware, so I might give it a show building the cards into a 6 PCI slot machine, not sure if this is it though.

The same behavure remains: one/two show(s) records OK, one gives 0 bytes and another one is unusually large.