Experiencing Frequent System Crashes

[Mysticeti]

Just installed SageTV and a Hauppauge PVR-500 card that I bought as a bundle. I'm new to SageTV so please don't assume I'm doing anything correctly (but I am not a noob when it comes to computers).

The PVR-500 drivers, SageTV, JRE 1.4 all installed without a hitch. Yay! :-)

Things quickly went down hill. :-(

I configured the tuners (no probs), set the quality to DVD Standard Play, tweaked a couple other things, and found that the playback was kind of jerky and that there were some artifacts. Then my system crashed. It now crashes after a few second to a minute of recording or watching "live" TV.

I'm guessing this is a problem with the Hauppauge card/drivers but how do I diagnose this and prove it?

Things I've tried:

• Moving the PVR-500 from the 3rd to the 2nd, then to the 1st PCI slot (it's now back in the 2nd slot as the 1st as the first PCI slot is very close to the video card)
• Upgrading to the SageTV 2.2 Release Candidate
• Removing tuner #2 so tuner #1 would be used, removing tuner #1 so tuner #2 would be used (trying to see if only one of the tuners was the problem -- no luck).

Here's some system info in case it's helpfull:
Windows XP Home SP 2
Athlon XP 1700+ (Soyo SY-K7V DRAGON Plus mobo)
512 MB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700LE (driver version 66.93)

Video Drivers, etc. are all up to date to the best of my knowledge.

Software Version: SageTV V2.2.5 RC

This system has been very stable up until this point.

Any suggestions on things to try to eliminate or pinpoint the problem would be greatly appreciated.

[MaxBurn]

Try out the wintv2000 that comes with the hauppage card. If it crashes with that it's the card / drivers.

[Grasshopper]

One way to check whether it's the Hauppauge card and/or drivers would be to try and run the software that comes bundled with the card. If that doesn't work, it's your card -- if it does, it's Sage.

Your mobo runs a Via chipset, which is commonly thought to be less stable than nVidia, but Sage recognizes your tuners, so I don't think that's the problem.

What decoder are you using? Overlay or VMR9? 3d acceleration enabled? When you say "System crashed", are you talking reboot or freeze? When your system crashes, can you three-finger-salute, quit Sage, and get back in business? Are you displaying on a TV or a monitor? Can you record without watching -- does it crash then?

[Mysticeti]

Wow! Outstanding response time on your replies guys. Thanks!

I don't see "wintv2000" anywhere on the CD that came with the bundle (looks like only drivers on the CD). I'll poke around on Hauppauge's site to see if I can get it there.

I'm using the VMR9 decoder. I believe this was the default.

3D acceleration is enabled (again, I think this was the default).

By "System crash" I mean reboot. At one point I had the SageTVService enabled and the system was crashing, rebooting, crashing, rebooting, (lather, rinse, repeat) until I could disable the scheduled recording.

I am displaying on both a TV and a monitor (the video card has a "clone" feature).

I believe it still crashes when it's recording w/o watching.

Thanks!

[Toddly]

Try running in Overlay mode to see if that helps. I think it is easier on the system and video card. See if it will run stable in that mode.

[Mysticeti]

The crashes do happen even when I'm not watching anything but I tried "Overlay" anyway and the crashes still occurred.

I found WinTV2000 on the Hauppauge site but it doesn't look like this app will work with the PVR-500. It wanted a DLL I didn't have and when I installed some more drivers from Hauppauge to get that DLL then WinTV2000 gave me this error "Failed To Create TV Window another Application may be using the driver error when running WinTV".

I've uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers about 100 times now to no avail. :-(

It's late I'm a bit fried/frustraited so I'm calling it a night.

Any other suggestions for me for tomorrow when I'm fresh? :-)

[Grasshopper]

I don't have a PVR500 so I can't solve issues that might be specific to that card. When you tried running WinTV2000, did you quit out of Sage completely -- not just sleeping in the system tray?

[Mysticeti]

I'm fairly certain SageTV was not running, yes. The SageTVService has been turned off and I had just rebooted (I tried several times).

According to Hauppauge's web site the PVR-500 requires a third party app unless you use it under Windows XP Media Center Edition.

Thanks.

[Grasshopper]

Hmm. I don't know this problem, as my only troubles so far have come on playback. Submit a support request, George is quite helpful.

[SHS]

Mysticeti try disable auto reboot so you see what crash the system

[Mysticeti]

Thanks for the suggestion SHS. I shall do that when I get home from work tonight.

I also want to add something that I thought was innocuous but might be significant: this PC had the "If my device needs a driver, go to Windows Update without asking me" radio button selected when I first put in the PVR-500 card. I can't say for certain what happened when the new hardware wizard fired up... Did it grab the drivers off the CD which was in the drive? Or did it grab the drivers off the 'net? I'm about 95% certain that there were no "these drivers don't have Microsoft's official stamp of approval, are you sure you want to use them" dialog boxes that first install. Subsequent installs for which I've explicitly used the CD's drivers for, have had that dialog box. I've used the HWCLEAN several times but if if there are turds left over from that first that are from MS, not from Hauppauge, I'm not sure HWCLEAN will clean them. (?)

Finally, I'm going to try to update my mobo's BIOS (I need to cook up a bootable DOS CD to do this however).

If after that I still can't make any progress I'll contact George in support.

Thanks!

[Mysticeti]

Woohooo! The BIOS upgrade seems to have fixed the problem!

I have lots of other questions but I should do some expirementing and some reading before posting.

Thanks much for all the suggestions.

Oh, for the next noob who buys the PVR-500... There does seem to be an app on the Hauppauge CD that will drive the card. It's not named WinTV2000 or anything obvious but I think it's the only .exe in the root folder of the CD.