HDPVR2 Halts in Recording
 

One of my HDPVR 1212s died recently, so I decided to switch over to two HDPVR2s that I have had sitting in the closet, despite some of the live TV audio issues with the HD300.

That said, I am getting halts in about 30% of my recordings. The Sage log shows the following error about setting up hardware video compression. Did I miss something in setting these up? When I originally picked these HDPVR2s up several years ago, I had to edit the registry to get Sage to recognize them. I think I saw that Sage does not need the registry to be manually edited, so perhaps I need to remove the prior entries? I have the latest drivers installed. Maybe I am missing something else?

In my experience, "halts" were almost always related to power issues, and these are notorious for having power issues, which is why many people (including myself) decided to use the 5v Molex connector coming from the PC itself.

Do the HDPVR2 power adapters have different requirements?

I'm having a similar problem once in a while, but the video freezes for a couple seconds then comes back, then repeats the freeze about every 5 to 15 seconds.

I just posted about that on another thread last night. https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/sho...5&postcount=12

I have had those periodically as well and they also seem to be from a failing PS.

It's possible that both power supplies in both HDPVR2s are flakey, though they have only been used for a few hours max when I first tested them out. Since the Sage log indicated that this might be a driver issue and it seems to happen only when initiating the recording, I used the Hauppauge tool to remove all Hauppauge drivers and software, then reinstalled the HDPVR2 drivers. Testing to see how that works now.

I'm not missing anything else that needs to be specially set up for the HDPVR2 am I? I have my Directv receivers set up for native resolution and whatever audio they spit out. I recall it can be picky about audio, could that be causing issues?

I can't think of anything else that you would need. Hauppauge's stuff can be flakey on various computers, and I ended up having to use an old version of the Hauppauge software suite to dial in the settings to get 5.1 channel audio over SPDIF (out from the XBOX360).

The strangest thing I had recently with the freezing was primarily on 1 channel that the Bucks were playing on, which seems strange. I have everything recording to 1080p on the HDPVR2's.

They are 6V rather than 5V. You can reference the thread that @wayner linked to but tap into the 12V line in a Molex, then wire that to a DC-DC buck converter to get the 6V. They are cheap on Amazon, just make sure you get one that can drive about 3A so you have some headway. Be sure and adjust the output voltage before connecting it to the HDPVR2.

Or just purchase a new 6V/3A wall wart and be done with it until it, too, dies.

Thanks for the suggestions. It appears that using the HCWClear program from Hauppauge to clear out all of the drivers and settings, then reinstalling the software seems to have worked. I have recorded about 10 different shows and have not had any halts detected. I guess my Sage system will live on a little longer.

I will probably pick up an extra wall power supply. I probably went through a dozen or so over the years on my HDPVR 1212s.

OK, I am returning to this thread because I am still having issues with my HDPVR2 units. Occasionally, I will get a recording error and the recording either didn't record or recorded black video/audio.

Today I caught the error on live TV for the first time and discovered that, at that time, neither of the two HDPVR2 units would record. Sage threw a "capture device failure" at start of recording when I tried to record with either HDPRVR2. Neither of the lights on the HDPVR2 changed like they do when they start recording and the Sage log showed the compression error copied below.

I power cycled both units and they still would not record properly. Finally, I restarted the Sage service and they worked after that.

This all makes me think it is due to a bug in Sage itself. I am running the latest 32 bit version of Sage at the moment and have tried using different compression/bitrate settings, but that hasn't helped.

Does anyone have any other thoughts on this?

I see this on my Win 8 VM on Unraid that I use as a network tuner for my HDPVR2's. I reboot the VM every night, but sometimes by that evening recordings will fail and it takes a restart of the Sage service to get them going again.

I've been thinking about options including moving off a VM to a dedicated computer, or a script that restarts the service at around 5PM or so every day.

Zogg, are you getting similar errors in your log where Sage basically can't start a recording, as opposed to halting in the middle of a recording? If so, have you been able to confirm that it happens to two tuners at the same time?

I created a windows task to reboot every night to see if that fixed things, and that did not appear to help.

I am not an expert, but it seems to me like this is a problem or bug in Sage and not necessarily a driver issue. If it was a driver issue, I think restarting Sage would not work and rebooting the computer would be necessary. Perhaps a bug report needs to be submitted.

I have 3 HDPVRs but 2 are connected to STB's and get used frequently. I have seen both or just one fail to start a recording at the same time, or I've seen one of them crap out in the middle of a recording. I believe I've seen one of them keep recording while one had halted, but not during my most recent log files that I can check.

Like you, I created a task to reboot Windows every night at 4AM, but I'm not sure it helps. I have a script that will halt the service and restart it, so I'm thinking about doing that every day about 4PM which seems to be a dead time for recordings.

It's hard to say if it's a Sage bug or a driver bug, but I'm leaning toward driver since Hauppauge doesn't have the best track record on these. I will say though that I have a Gen 1 HDPVR on my HTPC that is used as a lower priority network tuner, rarely rebooted, and it always just works.

Is it possible that the initial problem is with the HDPVR or it’s driver? I’m not sure what Sage does when it detects a problem, but once detected, maybe Sage marks the tuner as bad and stops trying to use it? I don’t now how often Sage goes back to check to see if the tuner is good again, so maybe Sage just doesn’t know it was fixed until you restart Sage.

I'm not exactly sure how Sage treats "bad" tuners, either. I've seen it ignore "bad" tuners, and I've seen it continue to try to use "bad" tuners. I think at least for network tuners there's some sort of check because after I reset my VM and get the tuners going, at some point Sage will start to use them again.

I don't think Sage marks the tuner as bad, or at least not here. In this latest instance with me, it was continually trying to start only one of the tuners and failing but would not switch to the second tuner. I had to "record" one show with the first tuner while trying to watch a second show to make the second tuner work.

I'm not an expert, but the only way I could see that this was a driver issue is if the driver sometimes doesn't like how Sage is requesting control of the tuners and then completely blocks the program from having any access to it, thereby preventing access to either tuner. But I somehow doubt this driver is capable of that behavior. And I am not sure how restarting Sage would fix the issue in this case.

Is there a way to get a more detailed version of logs? If so, that might be the next step here.

I think there's a difference if the tuner is a network tuner, because I've seen Sage stop trying to use mine and switch to other tuners. If I reset that VM and/or the Sage service running on the VM, it will take a while before the main Sage instance (UnRaid) starts using it again.

The Sage log is the only log I know of. If you have it repeatedly trying to use a local tuner, then running Process Explorer might help. I have used it several times to drill down in a Windows process to see what is causing a program to misbehave. Sometimes you can't really tell but sometimes you can see it hanging on a function call or I/O action and it will clue you in to the real problem.

Have you tried the HDPVR2 with the component cables? I wonder if that would make a difference. I'm going to switch over to those and SPDIF to see if that makes any difference.

I have not, as I get good video quality from HDMI, plus it's a much smaller cable.

My experience with the HDPVR using HDMI input was terrible. Numerous "random" lockups, which were traced to program-stream changes from the source, usually occurring at commercial insertion or other program-feed change. Since changing from HDMI to Component input, no lockups in over 3 years. I don't have a HDPVR2, so can't say with certainty that it has a similar issue.