HD-PVR 1.0.3.53 Beta AC-3 5.1 Audio Drivers are out

[Chriscic]

Interesting Killervette. Many times when I get the stuttering it won't stop, even when I hit pause. Also last night when I first turned the HD100 on it was on TBS HD and looking and sounding perfect. I left it on for an hour not touching it, and sadly when I returned the video had turned choppy for no apparent reason.

I'm looking forward to getting home this evening and seeing what happened with all those recordings.

Ever since my first C1 unit, which would only record for <1 minute before blacking out, I've always associated signal loss with a failure/overheating of the HD-PVR. You should never have to powercycle. Perhaps there's a software issue but I think that's hardware.

[Taddeusz]

For those who haven't seen the post Hauppauge released a new v1.1 driver for the HD-PVR.

See: Hauppauge HD-PVR v1.1 drivers released

[Chriscic]

Thanks I had no idea there were new drivers.

Do we know they're different than the beta drivers, or just renamed?

EDIT: Ok, forget that q... the thread link suggests that there is. Keeping fingers crossed for greater success with these.

[Chriscic]

First of all, I checked all the recordings from last night, still using the beta drivers. I had about ten recordings, and playing and jumping around there seemed to be no problems in any of them, except for the sound occasionally dropping out, which could easily be fixed by hitting the jump back or forward button a couple of times (in other words a temporary playback glitch, no prob. with the recording). Live TV though was still a mess.

Installed the 1.1 drivers (did not clear out the old ones first), and things are definitely better with live TV. Channel changing was working most of the time, with smooth playback and good audo sync maybe 7 out of ten times, after waiting 5-10 seconds for things to smooth out. Sometimes though audio sync is just flat off though or the video jerky... if I switched off the channel and then back though sometimes that would fix it, sometimes not.

Also, I'm not certain but I think things got worse the more I switched around. After 10 minutes of channel changing, I got a signal lost error and had to power cycle the HD-PVR to get it working again (restarting the HD100 by itself didn't do the trick).

I'm still wondering if the lost signal error is a software thing or a hardware failure. Maybe the constant channels changes are somehow stressing the HD-PVR and causing it to fail whereas the only occasional channel changes from recording do not cause a problem.

Although there are still problems, at least it's good enough for the moment to put the HD100 in my living room and see how it goes for a day or two of watching. Things need to get better from a live TV watching point of view for me to embrace the solution.

I wonder if Sage can make things better with additional firmware and software updates.

[briands]

So, what is the status of 5.1 via spdif for the HDPVR? I am using dish VIP211 boxes and thought I might finally try the digital audio option. Is this ready for prime time yet?

[bcjenkins]

Not in my recent testing, although on Linux, I think the issues are in firmware.

B

[Taddeusz]

My setup is, for the most part, fairly stable. Although about once every week or two I have to reset the HD-PVR.

[Beefcake550]

Mine has been rock solid with respect to 5.1 sound. You should add a line to .properties file (I forget the exact name) in the tuner section to put a 4000ms delay between tuning the channel and Sagetv decoding the signal. That made me be able to set my STB to send original resolution to the HDPVR for each channel (DirecTV).

Good luck.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Beefcake550

Mine has been rock solid with respect to 5.1 sound. You should add a line to .properties file (I forget the exact name) in the tuner section to put a 4000ms delay between tuning the channel and Sagetv decoding the signal.

It's delay_to_wait_after_tuning (or something very close to that), it should exist for the tuner already, but be set to 0. I set it to 4000 on Jeff's suggestion.

My guess is that you could tweak that number lower depending on how long the actual channel change takes. But I don't surf so the extra delay is no issue for the improved reliability.

[Taddeusz]

Yea, I have mine set to 2000 (2sec). That seems to be just enough time for it to change channels. Although I'm going to add another half second to it. It seems to catch the very tale end of the transition at times.

[bbig119]

Does this delay depend how we change the channel on our box? I'm hoping to setup channel changing via firewire, but currently use ir_blaster. I've heard that firewire is faster and if so, does that mean the delay number I'll need here will be less than what I use for the ir blaster?

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

Yea, I have mine set to 2000 (2sec). That seems to be just enough time for it to change channels. Although I'm going to add another half second to it. It seems to catch the very tale end of the transition at times.

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by bbig119

Does this delay depend how we change the channel on our box? I'm hoping to setup channel changing via firewire, but currently use ir_blaster. I've heard that firewire is faster and if so, does that mean the delay number I'll need here will be less than what I use for the ir blaster?

It should be, yes. About a month ago I reduced the amount of time from 7sec down to 2sec after figuring out how to insert leading zeros into my firewire channel changing. It's been working like a charm since and I don't have to wait a whole 7sec for a channel change.

[Beefcake550]

I'm using serial control for channel changing. Keep in mind it's not really the "channel change" that we are waiting for....it's the change channel followed by the time it takes for the video and audio signals being fed to the HDPVR to become "stable" for the HDPVR to pickup on them and do the right thing (tm). "Stable" is a bad term, but it's the best I can come up with right now.

I've tried lower numbers, but seems like 4000 is full proof when changing resolutions like from 480i to either 720p or 1080i on the source. Yes, I can set my DirecTV output to be a constant 720p as I've been doing for a while now, but I'm experimenting to see if the size of the recording for 480i are actualy smaller.

-B

[stanger89]

I think unless you change the recording quality, the size should be similar since you specify bitrate in the quality.

[Taddeusz]

480i recordings are much smaller. The bitrate it uses is variable so it adjusts it down for the lower resolution.

[stanger89]

Cool, I didn't think it was that smart, not from the settings we have available.

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Cool, I didn't think it was that smart, not from the settings we have available.

It's a fairly large difference. My recordings of DS9 recorded through my HD-PVR at 480i clock in at about 2GB while an hour recording at 1080i is almost 6GB.

[stanger89]

Those with all the same recording quality?

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Those with all the same recording quality?

Yes, I have my HDPVR recording quality set to "Best-H.264".