Instability Issues

[rennocneb]

Hi imhaving stability issues using GBPVR. The system is an intel P4 2.8 with 512mb of RAM 250GB 16mb cache Maxtor Hard disk, nVIDIA FX5200 Lite Edition, WinTV PVR 150 tuner, using their latest remote software and cyberlink Power DVD's Decoder. The system is rock solid stable in windows (Windows XP Pro SP2) and seems at times to be stable in GBPVR(When setting unatteneded most of the time when doing recordings) It gives me the most trouble during playback,or when recording and doing other things) Also it has become nearly unusable after installing MyVideos and ComSkip .65 Im also wondering if it could be a power supply issue. Im using a coolermaster Home Theater PC CASE with a 300 watt powersupply.

[spinalcracker]

I have an almost identical system with an identical problem. Help!

[reboot]

Although possible that it's power, I doubt it.
More likely the cyberlink decoder.
Try nvidia's, or Intervideo's, even the one directly from hauppauge support.
If it's crashing during multitasking, it could be a drivers issue. What version of the Hauppauge drivers are you using?

[capone]

I had a setup similar to yours w/ a 250W supply, and I did run into power issues, but not what you describe. The eG-Force FX 5200 card was a power pig, and over time, would create waves/flickers in the image, almost like a video oscillator. When I switched to a non-name 5600 that came w/ another system that was less needy, it looked/worked fine. That is, except for the UPS. It had so little extra power that any hiccup (even just the UPS taking over) was too much and it would reset. Since I got a newer system w/ a 350W, it handles blackouts like a champ.

Anyway, I never saw behavior like yours, but I was using an AMD 2700. I also had 2 drives and a DVD player, so I had other demands, too. It's still possible, but if you had issues w/ power, you wouldn't have issues w/ just playback. The biggest power demand is when watching live and I'm guessing more so w/ timeshift (since it's recording and decoding/displaying feed).

I wouldn't rule it out, but if you want to test, see if you get any of that behavior when not using the 150. If you do, I doubt it's power, as it would be much worse w/ it it active.

[spinalcracker]

Hi imhaving stability issues using GBPVR. The system is an intel P4 2.8 with 512mb of RAM 250GB 16mb cache Maxtor Hard disk, nVIDIA FX5200 Lite Edition, WinTV PVR 150 tuner, using their latest remote software and cyberlink Power DVD's Decoder. The system is rock solid stable in windows (Windows XP Pro SP2) and seems at times to be stable in GBPVR(When setting unatteneded most of the time when doing recordings) It gives me the most trouble during playback,or when recording and doing other things) Also it has become nearly unusable after installing MyVideos and ComSkip .65 Im also wondering if it could be a power supply issue. Im using a coolermaster Home Theater PC CASE with a 300 watt powersupply.

It appears I have made my system rock solid. I went and got the nVidia DVD decoder software... installed it and set it up in the config... then I also noticed the amount of RAm this app consumes so for now I just downloaded FreeRamXP and set it to do an agressive freeing every five minutes for about 250megs as well as a threshold of 150megs (on a 512 system). I will probably just buy more ram later on, but this works great for now and is free. I also created a batch file that I scheduled to run near the time of the EPG update on a daily basis. (Prior to these updates this system was running for only a few days and I had 80% fragmentation).

That's it... hasen't crashed since and the picture seemed to improve with the nVidia decoder, (I have a nVidia video card for output so this improvement may not occur with other cards).

To create the batch file just open notepad and write

defrag.exe "Enter your drive here without the quotes" -v -f

Save it as AutoDefrag.bat

Start the windows Task Scheduler Wizard (Start-> All Progams -> Accesories -> System Tools -> Scheduled Tasks)

Select the bat file you just create and set it to wake and run whenever you want.

I have mine set to wake and run at 4:00am daily.


Now I am happy!

[capone]

The nVidia decoder is great, but in another post I mentioned I found it it added about 15-20% more processing (on a 1.8Ghz proc). That said, it's worth it for me.

If your sys is PVR-only, another 256-512 will do the trick. Recovery may not help a whole lot, because if GB is using up all the ram, there's nothing to free up. When you're not doing anything, it would be helpful I suppose. A good ram recovery app will have settings about not doing during high activity, or just do when you're above a limit (and not just every few min).

But, in the end, if it works for you, then what you have may be best.

[spinalcracker]

Ya nothing will take the place of more physical ram. The program I am using does offer the settings you mention, but I found that doing an agressive freeing every five minutes kept an even amount of ram free for gbpvr rather than waiting until it gets very low and then trying to free it. This was causing a pause while it was freeing and hogging all the cpu. Also, as you said if GBPVR is taking all the ram there is nothing to free so setting solely a threshold was causing problems. Setting a freeing every five minutes if below a certain amount of free ram seems to be working well.

I have not noticed nVidia's DVD decoder using anymore CPU than Cyberlink or Intervideo did.

All I know was I was having complete system crashes every 20 - 40 minutes, prior to the changes I mentioned. At first I thought it was over heating, but after changing the cpu heatsink and fan and putting the open box right up against the air conditioner on high, I ruled that out.

Today I put the box back how it was, (closed with original heat sink and fan), and let the system run all day recording, watching live tv, timeshifting, recording while playing emulated games etc..

Never crashed once, never got slow, or choppy. Even recorded to and played back from another computer on my network.


A Poor hack way of solving this, but as long as I don't get any more BSOD's I'll be happy. And later I'll upgrade from PC3200 515megs to 1Gig.

Then I'll change the medium quality levels to high

[GoodGuys]

Where does one get the nVidia decoder?
Thanks,
GGF

[capone]

http://www.nvidia.com/object/dvd_decoder.html

[GoodGuys]

Thanks. Got it. Now testing.
GGF