one channel coming in garbled

[tchapin]

Hi there. Earlier this week, when recording Project Runway on Bravo, the program was unwatchable due to a massive number of artifacts introduced in the video stream. When I watch a TV connected directly to the cable box, things appear fine.

However, the problem is reproducible through SageTV on Bravo both in recorded programs as well as while watching live TV.

The problem is definitely introduced into the recording, as when I view the files via an alternate method, the artifacts are still present. The problem happens whether I am using SageMC or the standard STV.

The problem happens w/ the MPV as well as Placeshifter. When I use the Sage interface on my server, I get this message when I try to view the programs:

"Playback Error in playback. sage.PlaybackException: Error (-4,0x80040217) There was a problem rendering the video portion of the content for playback."

From what I've seen so far, Bravo is the only channel affected, but I haven't done a comprehensive flip through the many hundreds of channels yet...

Any ideas on how to fix this or do further troubleshooting?

Thanks.

Todd

[Conejo]

Is the corrupted project-runway recording a 'one-time issue' or are you having more problems with Bravo, or other channels as well?

In a previous post in April you wrote that you had just applied the registry changes to fix video timeline issues you had recording with a PVR-150. Have most of the recordings made since applying that change been trouble free?

Every once in a while I'll get a corrupted recording for whatever reason and if I really, really, really needed to watch that program then I'll use a licensed copy of VideoRedo and run it through a Quick_Stream_Fix. At worst, it chops out a second or so of bad frames and gives me a renamed recording I can play.

Your previous post also mentioned that you had "downloaded the trial of VideoRedo and tried the Quick Stream Fix, but that did not appear to work at all. The output file was only 1k or so." This may have been a limitation with an unlicensed trial version of VideoRedo.

[tchapin]

Hi Conejo,

It's happening even when I watch Bravo Live TV.

All of the old recordings that were affected by the weird timeline thing have long been deleted. Luckily, that problem only happened during a week or two period of time. Yes, the registry changes seemed to have solved that issue.

I was away this past week and my wife only told me of the problem this morning. I had her reboot the computer and that did not seem to clear it up.

Thanks.

Todd

[Conejo]

All channels should be affected the same, since the PVR-150 card uses a hardware-based onboard chip to encode the MPEG2 stream.

Watching a program using LiveTV or watching the program recording is one and the same. SageTV first sends the encoded stream to save as a file then retrieves it for LiveTV.

Once a file is recorded with corrupt data it's permanent unless you use a product like VideoRedo to rewrite the recorded program.

I get corrupted recordings on my PVR-500 (contains two PVR-150 modules) if I set it to any recording quality above a Best 3.0GB/hr setting.
Detailed Setup > Multimedia > Recording Quality > Set Quality (Default Quality: BEST; Hauppauge WinTV PVR PCI II Capture: Not Set)

[tchapin]

Reboot had no effect.

It was only one channel. I would have expected it to happen to all channels, but I was surprised.

Well, I updated to the latest version of SageTV + Java today and rebooted afterwards, and things cleared up.