Crash on PVR-350 playback while recording

[bemoore]

I had a recent setback in my quest in promoting my PVR setup with the wife. I was recording a program while playing a different program through the TV Out of my PVR-350. At about the 45 minute mark of the program being recorded, I paused the playback for about a minute, then hit play. Usually, this results in the playback jumping back about 1/4 second and then resuming. I got the usual 1/4 second back jump, but this time it froze. It would not respond to any input from the remote. I was able to exit playback mode and GBPVR with the keyboard. I restarted GBPVR but then it wouldn't respond to anything except a close, which generated a Windows error. The bad part is that the recording in progress stopped. The systray GBPVR app reported that the program was still recording, but the file size was not increasing. I tried restarting the recording service, and that seemed to work. Unfortunately, it restarted the recording using the same file name, which overwrote the previous 45 minutes of the program. This didn't go over well with the wife (it was one of her shows). I would really like to be able to play a file while recording something else without risk of losing the program being recorded. What could cause the problem I encountered? BTW, this PC is the family computer and is usually running Outlook, Internet Explorer, and maybe a couple of more apps. The recording being played was recorded using WinTV2000, but I've not had trouble with other recordings from the same source, but this was the first time I've tried playback while recording. The recording and playback directories are on a secondary 250GB drive dedicated to videos. How do I need to go about troubleshooting this? Is there a tutorial somewhere explaining the error logs?

Thanks.

[stefan]

The drivers for the 350 are really crappy when it comes to using the tv-out of the card. Especially when displaying OSD on top of the video (as is the case when you hit pause/whatever). Some people have no problems at all. Others, like me, get their computers hanged (hung?) every time they do stuff. Others just get their applications hanged. You seem to be in this last group. Some people have reported better results with the last drivers from shspvr.com, others say it makes no difference.

If this is a real issue for you, you have two options: use an application that does not display OSD, or use software decoding. I switched to software decoding, and have had none of these issues after that.

[bemoore]

Doh! That's not the answer I wanted. But I guess I'm not totally surprised. I'll try the latest drivers (if they're different from mine) and see if that helps. I don't think that software decoding would be a valid option for me. I would need additional hardware, and my PC is not powerful enough, or I haven't found the magic combination of settings and codecs to make it work smoothly.

Thanks.

[stefan]

I had to work quite a bit for the software decoding to work, but now it does fairly well. My box is dedicated to GBPVR, though, so nothing else is going on on it. My Epia is about the equivalent of a PIII600.

[bemoore]

I checked my PVR-350 driver and I have the latest, so no help there.

[stefan]

Ok.