Computer Wizards help needed

[Jaggy]

I am completely flam-dumb-zambled on this one.... so if any of you computer bright sparks can come up with an explanation I would be very very appreciative indeed.

As a little background I have an (old now) dedicated PC just as a PVR server & do all my watching/listening etc. via NMT's & I have had digital recording glitch problems ever since I setup for DVB-S around six odd years (the PC wasn't all that old in those days) ago but within the last fortnight I discovered something I almost completely missed for those six odd years....

I had an (almost new) splitter failure a couple of Wednesday's ago that caused all my recordings to fail that night, the next day (Thursday), being as I was flat out, I just hooked up my second dish direct to one card (this required lnb setting to be changed so I did a pc re-boot as well) & the reception/recording of the news was good with only two micro-glitchs (that you wouldn't have even seen if you weren't really looking for them) but the next night (Friday) having not changed anything it was almost totally unwatchable rubbish.... Saturday I hooked everything back into the first dish with a different splitter & changed the lnb settings again & did a quick warm re-boot of the PC & the news recording that evening was almost glitch free..... Sunday & again the news recording was glitchy (not un-watchable but bloody annoying) so Monday I was thinking about this & thought it couldn't be could it, nah no way, well maybe, but I can't think why it would, well it isn't all that hard to test.... so around 4:30pm I again did a PC warm boot & low & behold the news recording was actually 100% glitch free.... the next day I didn't re-boot it & there were glitchs again in the recording of the news... then next day a warm boot at around 4:45pm & 100% glitch free again.... yesterday I did a warm boot at around 7:50am & there were a small amount of glitchs in last nights recording... today I have done a warm boot at around 12:10pm & I will see the results tonight... but it appears I have been chasing the wrong end of these glitch problem all along & I have shelled of quite a few $ trying to fix the dish/lnb/cables which I thought were the culprits but they don't seem to have been it all along

[gEd]

the only thing (that comes to my mind) that a reboot would appear to fix would be a memory leak or a process hogging the cpu.
I guess you have been using task manager to track these resources?

just for giggles, you could try it with the pc case off to see if it is an overheating problem that is causing the cpu to slow down (mind I am not sure if 6year old cpus had auto-throttling in response to temp) wouldn't hurt to try tho.

[stustunz]

I have 4 tuners physical tuners(see sig) all was fine with 3 but when I added the fourth because of prime tv changing frequency I get glitches on the nova-s tuner
im not sure if it was a signal slitting issue or what.

My solution for now is disable nova-s and record prime from dvb-t ,reason I don't like this is the files are double the size but at least the glitches are gone

what tuner(brand etc) are you using ?

[Jaggy]

the only thing (that comes to my mind) that a reboot would appear to fix would be a memory leak or a process hogging the cpu. I guess you have been using task manager to track these resources?

Actually I haven't looked at task manager for ages, the only things on this computer are XPsp3 & GB-PVR, it has no firewall enabled & no antivirus on it, even win updates have been turned of for quite some time now, so unless the MLPanel plugin (which does get a lot of use) or GB-PVR are hogging the cpu or causing a memory leak.....

just for giggles, you could try it with the pc case off to see if it is an overheating problem that is causing the cpu to slow down (mind I am not sure if 6year old cpus had auto-throttling in response to temp) wouldn't hurt to try tho.

It is actually permanently running with the side panels off & has done so for all of it's life.... it lives on to of the cupboards in the hall so it doesn't matter what it looks like

I have 4 tuners physical tuners(see sig) all was fine with 3 but when I added the fourth because of prime tv changing frequency I get glitches on the nova-s tuner
im not sure if it was a signal slitting issue or what.

Are these glitchs just like a bad signal, pixilation squares & pops in the audio? If so is sounds very similar to my problem

My solution for now is disable nova-s and record prime from dvb-t

Unfortunately currently my dvb-t isn't very well setup so it isn't an option for me in the short term...I am in the middle of re-setting up/ moving my uhf antennas but it will be some time before I can get back onto it

,reason I don't like this is the files are double the size but at least the glitches are gone

Like you I don't like the bigger file size & if it glitchs in these recordings sometimes it just kills the NMT & the only way to get going again is a cold boot of the NMT which takes quite some time.

what tuner(brand etc) are you using ?

Currently working down from the top of the case

Nova-t usb
agp video
hvr-4000
pvr-500
pvr-500
hvr-3000
hvr-3000

and yeah I realise the pvr-500's can be removed now that analogue has gone but I have been reluctant to do it until I have more free time just in case the removal screws up the other cards

[bgowland]

Right-click "My Computer" and select "Manage". Select "Device Manager" then click "View" and select "Resources by type" then expand "Interrupt Request (IRQ)" and check which IRQ number is assigned to each capture card and if they share the same IRQ number with anything else (in particular your network adapter or something else which might be heavily active).

Juggling PCI slots can help if there's a shared IRQ number as can be assigned by slot. You might also be able to tweak IRQ number reservation in the BIOS setup. At one point I had a PVR-350, PVR-500 and 4x Nova-T cards and I spent a lot of time juggling slots and tweaking BIOS settings to prevent other hardware from messing up my recordings.

Cheers,
Brian

PS If you want to get rid of the PVR-500s just power down and pull them out. When you boot up XP simply won't load the drivers for them as they (obviously) won't be detected (that's PnP for you). Also probably a good idea to do it as they'll no longer take up hardware resources and take some variables out of the equation.

PPS If your HDD controller is sharing the same IRQ number as any of your capture cards it can have really nasty side-effects.

[Jaggy]

Thanks Brian, that is for sure worth having a look at....., I feel I will get a few free minutes during the coming week to at least have a look <grin>....

I know in theory I can just power down & pull out the old pvr-500's & there shouldn't be an issue, but I have been bitten in the past doing this sort of thing & PnP kicking in & changing resources for the other hardware & then things no longer working right, so I will wait for the Christmas break when the Boss will take some of the load off & do it then

[gEd]

conflicting IRQs and (excessive) signal splitting can certainly be problems but this doesn't really explain why the glitches disappear after a reboot.

[bgowland]

conflicting IRQs and (excessive) signal splitting can certainly be problems but this doesn't really explain why the glitches disappear after a reboot.

A reboot can improve behaviour for a short time at least. XP is notoriously bad at cleaning up memory and resources once they're no longer needed. After long periods of time my npvr box can become very sluggish (it runs 24/7) and Task Manager shows a lot of virtual and physical memory in use usually with a lot of paging operations going on. A reboot cleans things up and it becomes much more responsive.

CHeers,
Brian

[Jaggy]

Man there are times when I wonder why I play around with computers at all!!! (& to think I used to do this for a living sheesh)

I decided that rather than spend my time cocking around with the old xp server I would use that time to get my more up to date server up & running.... to make a long story short(er) I just couldn't get this sod to actually post reliably... so I decided in the mean time I would just install win7 onto the old server to see if that made a difference.... but being an old fuddy duddy I wanted to trial it out on my test rig pc first but I just can't get it to install (yes m$ does say this pc should be able to run it) I just get stuck at the message in the attached image..... I'm wondering if there is an issue with the install disk I have as I feel it should have the driver for a standard IDE DVD-writer included with the install??

[bgowland]

I'm wondering if there is an issue with the install disk I have as I feel it should have the driver for a standard IDE DVD-writer included with the install??

Since when was any MS Windows installation straight-forward? Easiest thing is visit the DVD drive manufacturer's site (using a different computer obviously), download the W7 driver for that DVD drive and bung it on a USB stick.