PVR-350 TV-Out MPEG2 hardware / SageTV problem

[AlexK]

I am using hardware MPEG2 for encoding and decoding on a PVR-350 and PVR-150 pair. The PVR-350 is in slot 1.

When we watch a recording to the very end using SageTV, a driver locks (CPU-wise) up the machine and closing SageTV causes a reboot. Updating to the latest Hauppauge driver won't help. Neither SageTV nor Hauppauge will accept any responsibility - simply pointing at the other. When it freezes up it will sometimes corrupt the Sage properties file - another annoyance.

Anyone else had this problem? The PVR-350 TV out quality is excellent and allows us to use this PC for other purposes while watching TV. Pity it isn't more reliable.

Thanks,
Alex

[Opus4]

That reminds me... has anyone using the v3 beta had a chance to try out the options listed in this post to see if either of them help?

- Andy

[pcuoco]

Alex, that is the dreaded End of File bug. If you do a search you'll find a lot of info on it. As Opus points out, there is supposed to be a fix for it in beta V3.0.11 and up.

I haven't seen any reports of people saying it's fixed. I haven't had the time as of late to test it myself, and do the majority of my viewing on a non-350 client now.

Hopefully it fixes it, because on a standard def TV, it really makes a big difference in picture quality.

[AlexK]

"Alex,

The issue with the PVR-350 out is a driver issue. We are using a feature of
the driver that Hauppauge is not actively supporting. Our developers and
Hauppauge are working on this.

I'm sorry I don't have anything else to give you.

George"

Thanks for your input, I will try version 3 and the videoframe/play_seam_advance fix when it goes gold. I do think it would be appropriate for Frey to warn potential PVR-350 buyers until this is fixed for good, and ditto for Hauppauge when they recommend PVR software. Great forum.

Alex

[mayamaniac]

I'm the lucky few or only lucky one that no longer have 350 issues.

Before, like everyone else, I had all the same 350 issues when I was using it up to SageTV v2.28, EOF stalls and lockups were frequent. Then one day, I did nothing except upgrade to 3.05 and all the 350 problems went away. It still locks up once a while, like maybe once in a month, which is acceptable to me. And I didn't change anything else besides upgrading SageTV to 3.x, using same hardware and same drivers that was crashing in 2.28.

I recently upgraded to 3.013 and tried those tweaks that Opus4 suggested, I didn't really see any difference. Although I do noticed that playbacks do stop before the end of the file, maybe 3-5 seconds before it ends.

I don't use the 350 for recording shows, it's only used for TV-Out on the client machine. I have intel P4 and intel motherboard/chipset. I really have no idea why it started working properly besides upgrading 3.x. I would downgrade to 2.28 to test whether it would crash again, but I hate to mess with it when its working well.