HD PVR really worth it?

[popechild]

Originally Posted by ehfortin

Hi again,

I just found the problem. The television was tricking me, telling I was in 720p or 1080i but it was upscaling the 480i/480p. I finally figure how to force by STB to be at 720p and now, arcsoft is reporting that I really have 720p and the TV is saying the same as well. The image just have a much better sharpness now.

I'll have to play with this new setup for some time. It seems that now I have stuttering as well and my CPU usage went a lot higher. As I changed a lot of other config to figure the softness issue, I'll have to take the time to put everything back as per the various recommendation and make sure everything is stable.

I certainly hope my wife will accept the image improvement as enough


Etienne

There's a known problem with 720p right now (confirmed by Narflex in a nother post). Supposedly it'll be resolved in the next driver update, but until then I think most folks who have experienced any glitches in playback with 720p are forcing the STB's output to 1080i. At least I know I am, and that solved my 4-5 sec hiccup problems.

[Taddeusz]

The only problems I've had are with FF/REW on both the HD Extender and my Client. I thought I read somewhere that there was a timeline issue with the current HD-PVR drivers that they were working with Hauppauge to solve. And that might explain the odd FF/REW behavior.

I mostly have this problem with 480i recordings on my HD Extender. 1080i seem to be better. Although I get weird huge jumps during FF/REW regardless of resolution. That is somewhat frustrating at times.

[ehfortin]

Well, image is a lot more precise as I said in my last post. However, I have an issue with sagetv. After a few channel change, I get a black screen and then, nothing is responding back in sagetv. The PC is still responsive but sagetv is hang. If I kill it and restart it, the problem usually arrive right away which means I have to reboot the computer.

When I got this black screen, the HD-PVR is usually having the recording light on and the channel is really switched to the proper one.

I don't know if it is the same issue some people have reported. Next time it happens, I'll try to restart the HD-PVR to see if it changes anything.

The interesting thing is that I never got that issue when I was receiving the 480i signal.

Regarding the display of a live show, what is a normal "back log" compared to the STB directly? Right now, if I change channel, it can take about 5 seconds after the STB change to the new channel before I start to see it on the screen. That's not helping WAF for sure.

Is it something we can tune in any way?

For my own information, is there a summary of the best setup to use with the HD-PVR regarding recording/displaying? I've tried overlay and VMR9 without really impact (my CPU is always running at about 60-70% when displaying content that is being recorded). If I go in a menu that has no display, the CPU is going down to 2-3%. I have an ATI Radeon Pro 2400 and I always got a very low CPU usage with h.264 up to now. It seems that I'm probably not using the appropriate decoder for the stuff recorded with the HD-PVR.

All that to say that if there is any summary of the best setup (or a few alternatives known to work), I'll be more then happy to see it. It's just painful to try stuff that we get here and there on the forums and to figure which changes actually fix or break the config.

Thank you.


Etienne