Skipping Problems

[Paco]

Howdy.

I was wondering if anyone else has been experiencing problems with the skip feature in Sage. When I try to skip part of a recorded show (like commercials,) sometimes it skips way too much (like 5-6 minutes.) I am using the Hauppauge 34 button remote & ir sensor, and have the skip feature set to 10 seconds. I have also set the page up and down buttons to 30 seconds. I have the same intermittent problem with either button (skip or page up/down.)

Interestingly enough, if I go back to the original section of video I am watching, and press skip again, it works as it is supposed to (the problem is not consistent.) I am using Sage 6.1.9, and the default STV. OS is W2K, capture card is Hauppauge PVR 250, and only Sage and supporting drivers/software are installed. OS is on a separate HD, capture HD has 64k clusters. I am using a USB UIRT to control a Motorolla DCT700.

After searching through the forums, I found a reference to editing the registry for Hauppauge time line issues;

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\hcwPP2\DriverData
“HcwTimeStampIssue1”=dword:00000001
“HcwTimeStampIssue2”=dword:00000000

However, the Hauppauge PVR 250 does not use the hcwpp2 key. All I saw in the registry was a hcwpvrp2 key. So I added the \DriverData key and the time stamp dword values to hcwpvrp2, but this did not fix the problem.

Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated.

[Narflex]

The easiest thing to do to make skipping more consistent is to switch to a constant bitrate encoding mode if you're not using one already. These are called Fair, Good, Great and Best. All of the DVD modes are variable bitrate.

This can be changed under Detailed Setup->Multimedia->Recording Quality

Although this wouldn't explain it skipping 5-6 minutes instead of 10 seconds...it's worth a try IMO.

[Paco]

Many thanks for the reply. I had the recording quality set to DVD standard. I will try setting it to best and see if this fixes the problem. I am curious why a variable bitrate recording might cause this behavior. VBR is used in commercial DVDs, and I am not seeing any similar issues when viewing SageTV recordings with other video viewing software....

[Taddeusz]

I have the same issue with my PVR 250. Recordings done on my PVR 150 don't experience the same problems. I've resorted to using VideoReDo on a couple videos to correct them. I think it's a little bit of a waste but I'm thinking I'm going to buy another PVR 150 to replace the 250. It doesn't seem to crop up very often but when it does happen it seems to crop up a lot on my favorite programs. Now that I have ShowAnalyzer set up I get all sorts of crazyness with those messed up recordings.

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

I have the same issue with my PVR 250. Recordings done on my PVR 150 don't experience the same problems. I've resorted to using VideoReDo on a couple videos to correct them. I think it's a little bit of a waste but I'm thinking I'm going to buy another PVR 150 to replace the 250. It doesn't seem to crop up very often but when it does happen it seems to crop up a lot on my favorite programs. Now that I have ShowAnalyzer set up I get all sorts of crazyness with those messed up recordings.

I get the same thing every once in a while and I have a PVR 150. I even had a 3 hour sports recording play for only 45 minutes... even though Sagetv said it was 3 hours long.

Putting it through VideoRedo corrected this. So i now run a batchfile (using Dirmon to trigger) that runs VideoRedo against all my files before Comskip runs. This way I now get accurate commercial detection.

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by nyplayer

I get the same thing every once in a while and I have a PVR 150. I even had a 3 hour sports recording play for only 45 minutes... even though Sagetv said it was 3 hours long.

Putting it through VideoRedo corrected this. So i now run a batchfile (using Dirmon to trigger) that runs VideoRedo against all my files before Comskip runs. This way I now get accurate commercial detection.

Do you have that registry fix in place? Since I put that on my system I only ever have the problems from one of my tuners, which I determined was my PVR 250. I don't believe I've ever had any issues with videos recorded from my PVR 150. Whenever I notice the problem I always check which tuner it was recorded from and it's always the same one.

Ever since it started happening I've just been dealing with it because it was only ever an occasional issue. Now it's become more pronounced since I started using ShowAnalyzer a few weeks ago.

Hauppauge products are nice but I wonder why they never nailed this issue down permenantly.

[nyplayer]

Yes I have the registry fix but personnally I no longer fully trust the mpg's to all be accurate. so I rather run them through a 5 minute quickfix.

[Paco]

Thanks for all of the posts. Setting the recoding quality to one using CBR (Best) did not fix the problem... It appears that I will be in the market for a new tuner as this "problem" seems to happen very often. Does anyone have any recommendations? Should I just buy a PVR150, or perhaps the newer HVR 1600? I am using W2K, and I heard that W2K support for the 1600 was a little iffy, but I can use XP if needed. I just want something that works without having to post-process the recordings. It does not have to be Hauppauge, but they seem to be the most popular. I am also thinking about running a couple of these recordings thru a GOP fixer/analyzer just to see what is going on.

[Paco]

Howdy.

I was finally able to test a PVR 150 (MCE version.) I was hoping that this would solve the problem, but the video still skips. I also switched remotes (now using a streamzap.) I completely removed the PVR 250 (including all drivers and associated Hauppauge software,) rebooted the computer (verified that no software was installed or anything in the registry,) shut it down, installed the PVR 150, rebooted, and used the latest Hauppauge drivers. I also applied the timestamp fix.

What I am seeing now is a much less frequent jump of 5-6 minutes when I press the 30 skip button once, and a new oddity of somtimes skipping without stopping (like if I had pressed the skip button muliple times when it was only pressed once.)

This looks to me like a sagetv issue. I am using PowerDVD for the decoder.

Any ideas?

[nathanwray]

I moved my sage install to a new compaq machine (clean XP install) a couple of weeks ago. I've got two PVR-150s installed, pulls from my prior sage machine. Sage writes to a dedidated partition on the primary SATA system drive, and also to a second IDE drive, both formatted NTFS with 64k blocks. I'm recording at "dvd long play" quality.

Right away on the new machine we were getting random problems with recorded shows, maybe 10% of the shows we recorded. You could watch the show, at least initially, but if you hit "info" the time would always stay at zero seconds into the show. Hitting skip would often make the show jump to the beginning, sometimes the show would start playing very fast and not respond to stop or pause controls.

I pulled one of the video files and opened it with an MPEG analyzer that I downloaded - sorry, I don't recall which one, it was freeware though. The video's stated length was something like 101 million minutes long, which seemed fishy for a 1/2 hour show. After reading through the sage forums I was prepared to try some of the registry changes, but first, it occurred to me to check the system "event log". There were patches where I was getting 10-20 write behind/paging errors over the course of a minute, several times a day. I believe the error code was "-51".

I did some research and found that with the nvidia controller many people we getting similar problems, and one suggested fix was to stop using the nvidia controller driver. I went into devices, found the controller, picked update driver, "let me select the driver", and under compatible drivers there was the nvidia driver I was already using as well as "microsoft dual something controller". I switched to the microsoft driver and have not had the paging/write behind error since, nor have I had any unwatchable video files created. I speculate that the nvidia controller driver is unreliable when writing multi-gigabyte files like recorded shows.

So if you're having problems with invalid video files, check your windows event log for disk errors (control panel->administrative tools)

note: the error I was seeing was ID 51, "An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk1\D during a paging operation."

[Taddeusz]

Nvidia's IDE drivers are notoriously bad. Particularly for optical drives.