PVR-350 Video out OSD still broke

[ckron]

So far I really like .14, but now that the UI is even nicer, I want it to work more than ever!

I know we have beat this dead horse to a pulp, but has anyone gotten any furthur with this problem?

I must say that my video seems to hang in there for a few minutes before freezing up.

[Scriber]

I've only played with .14 a time or two and the 350 UI is indeed better on my i820 box (.13 was no go). Haven't tried on my i845, but from your post that may be a waste of time.

The issues I see are (1) sage hangs if I RW video (FF works fine??) and (2) the UI does not iniatilize until I play an mpg. Kinda funny actually since with prior betas it iniatialized fine but it hung during playback as you describe. I recall other reports of the intialize issue so that may still be outstanding.


UPDATE: FWIW, after a bit more play time, the intialization issue seems to have disappeared (at least for now) but unfortunately once in awhile I now get a solid green screen when starting a video Very strange. So far this behavior only occurs at the start and not during playback.

[krutaw]

Originally posted by ckron
So far I really like .14, but now that the UI is even nicer, I want it to work more than ever!

I know we have beat this dead horse to a pulp, but has anyone gotten any furthur with this problem?

I must say that my video seems to hang in there for a few minutes before freezing up.

It's an incompatibility between SAGETV / your motherboard Chipset drivers / PVR-350.

I had the exact same problem with an i845, and just got it working by downgrading to a i815 chipset motherboard. Kinda sucks that I have this P4 just sitting around... oh wait..

[walldome]

I seem to have the same problem ... Celeron 2.2G, 512M, PVR-350, OSD comes on for a few seconds, behaves badly, and the system hangs.

Anyone know what drivers work and which don't? Any BIOS updates that would make a difference?

[fidget]

Originally posted by walldome
I seem to have the same problem ... Celeron 2.2G, 512M, PVR-350, OSD comes on for a few seconds, behaves badly, and the system hangs.

Anyone know what drivers work and which don't? Any BIOS updates that would make a difference?

What chipset does your Celeron have?

[cmalinowski]

I am having the same probs. I just purchased the dell about 6 mos ago with a celeron 2.4. Video out on PVR350 fine. Once I turn on UI, video freezes on 350...

DOn't know what to do... sucks. But worse is my jittery playback... need to start a new thread on that...

[fidget]

Originally posted by cmalinowski
But worse is my jittery playback... need to start a new thread on that...

There are already quite a few threads on that subject, just do a search. The standard questions are: What is your CPU loading? Have you formatted your HDD for 64 KB blocks?

[jominor]

I had some type of OS meltdown that forced me to reinstall. I took the opportunity to forgo reinstalling things I no longer used like Oracle.

Before the meltdown everything was great and I purchased Sage. Then, weeks before, the stuttering occured. Finally, the meltdown then reinstall.

After the reinstall, things are great! Now, anything could have happened that caused the problem, but it was faster for me to pull out the nukes than to diagnose(also I wanted to 'clean house').

I am now using 64k blocks on a dynamic disk (a 60g, 30g, 20g combined into a single partition).

All is well.

[walldome]

Re: Fidget asking "what's your chipset"

I don't know. How do I find out?

[fidget]

Originally posted by walldome
Re: Fidget asking "what's your chipset"

I don't know. How do I find out?

I build my machine from scratch, so I know which chipset came with my motherboard. If you have a pre-built, this seems to work for me under XP:

- Go to the device manager (system properties and then press the Device Manager button).
- Expand the System Devices line.
- Look for the Processor to I/O Controller. Mine says "Intel (R) 82865G\PE\P," which is the 865G chipset.

I have been reading that there are problems with the 845 chipsets.

[ckron]

Over the weekend, I yanked my PVR-350 out of my nice new machine and put it in this old Dell I had lying around. Here are the specs. on it:


Intel 440BX Chipset
PIII 500
256MB PC100 SDRAM
6GB ATA66 HDD
4MB ATI Onboard Video
Windows 2000 SP4


I just installed the latest drivers from Hauppauge website, IR application and SageTV 14 Beta. Once things got up and going, CPU utilization hovered around 15-20%. When using the OSD, it would spike up to 50-60%, but that was about it. Everthing worked great until I ran out of HDD space. NOTE: I enabled video out on PVR-350, IU out, and Hardware only. I could easily disconnect this from the monitor now. I am going to add RAM and a bigger HDD to this thing and make it my dedicated PVR


Conclusion: If you intend to use the PVR-350 for video out and not a monitor, you can use almost any old machine.

[pcuoco]

I also have the OSD working on an old machine with an Intel 440BX chipset ( ans Asus P3B-F) .

However a friend of mine tried to build a Sage box with the exact same motherboard and could not get the 350 to be stable with the OSD on. Video would lock up within 30 seconds.

He tried everything suggested on these boards, but no go.

So while the older chipsets seem to work, it doesn't appear to be fool-proof.

Paul

[ckron]

Originally posted by pcuoco
I also have the OSD working on an old machine with an Intel 440BX chipset ( ans Asus P3B-F) .

However a friend of mine tried to build a Sage box with the exact same motherboard and could not get the 350 to be stable with the OSD on. Video would lock up within 30 seconds.

He tried everything suggested on these boards, but no go.

So while the older chipsets seem to work, it doesn't appear to be fool-proof.

Paul

Does he have the BIOS version you do?

[maximumpig]

FWIW, I moved my 350 last night from slot 2 to slot 6 on my Asus P4C800E-Dlx (875P chipset) and the same problems persist with locking up with hardware out enabled, worse with HW out + UI-out as well. That doesn't rule out an interrupt conflict question but I don't know how to do that on an ACPI machine


since this is looking more and more like a deep-rooted hardware-type issue with the 350 and hardware out, anyone feel brave enough to try messing around with bios settings to see if that could solve 350 problems on some motherboards/chipsets? I could do some research on what is likely to affect a pci card or bus issue of this nature but i'm not knowledgable enough to really be of any use in this area.

I am wondering what insights the sage developers have on this particular set of problems, since they would seem to have to know a lot about how the card itself works in order to write the code to use it for sage's purposes.

[krutaw]

Originally posted by maximumpig

since this is looking more and more like a deep-rooted hardware-type issue with the 350 and hardware out, anyone feel brave enough to try messing around with bios settings to see if that could solve 350 problems on some motherboards/chipsets? I could do some research on what is likely to affect a pci card or bus issue of this nature but i'm not knowledgable enough to really be of any use in this area.

Well, as a matter of fact, I already tried that on the motherboard that I *was* using. I changed every single setting I could find in the bios, keeping track of what was changed. This took me about 2 weeks to complete, which is why I wasn't posting there for awhile. hehe

[pcuoco]

ckron,

Yes, we are both running the latest BIOS from the Asus site. In fact I flashed it with the same disk I used to update mine.

The only things different in our two machines is the video card. I'm using a Matrox G400 and he has an ATI Radeon 7500.

I remember his machine running a little hot however, and suggested he try a new case or add some cooling.

[maximumpig]

Krutaw---i take it nothing helps?

By the way do you or anyone else know how to tell what hardware IRQ a virtual IRQ is mapped to in an WinXP ACPI machine?

I was thinking I could boost the priority of the PVR-350's IRQ in the registry using this:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\PriorityControl]

IRQ8Priority=1 Determine the IRQ of the device you want to give top priority. Create a new DWORD with the IRQ number (e.g. IRQ5Priority) and give it a value of 1. Recommended that System CMOS/Real Time Clock be given the top priority to provide greatest overall system boost.

but was wondering if I needed to refer to the virtual IRQ or the hardware IRQ

Krutaw, you seem knowledgeable about this stuff--do you know if this might be fruitful??

[krutaw]

Originally posted by maximumpig
Krutaw---i take it nothing helps?

By the way do you or anyone else know how to tell what hardware IRQ a virtual IRQ is mapped to in an WinXP ACPI machine?

I was thinking I could boost the priority of the PVR-350's IRQ in the registry using this:



but was wondering if I needed to refer to the virtual IRQ or the hardware IRQ

Krutaw, you seem knowledgeable about this stuff--do you know if this might be fruitful??

Thanks, but I think I'm just getting lucky. Seriously though, I would think that, like any normal IRQ, it would be shown in the device manage.

I tried everything I could think of to avoid having to bring an old computer out of the closet. Though, now I'm happy I did, because I've got my P4 back as a toy.

[maximumpig]

messing around with IRQ priorities did not help

I may just have to bust out my old Dell XPSR-350 --jacked up with a Celeron Tualatin @ 1200 mhz proc courtesy of powerleap
(Dell's interpretation of the 440BX mobo)

now that I'm thinking of it, it might make a nice HTPC. . .

[Scriber]

Originally posted by maximumpig
messing around with IRQ priorities did not help

I may just have to bust out my old Dell XPSR-350 --jacked up with a Celeron Tualatin @ 1200 mhz proc courtesy of powerleap
(Dell's interpretation of the 440BX mobo)

now that I'm thinking of it, it might make a nice HTPC. . .

FWIW, I'm now (my i845 was no go) using the same setup except its the i820 w/o hanging...but I get an intermittent green screen on startup. Going to scrounge for an i815 Tualatin board (toss the powerleap) as some have indicated that the 350s OSD is a go on that board. I was concerned about running XP on a 440bx but with the PL perhaps that's another (better?) way to go.