Plextor TV402U Creates MPG Not AVI

[mindrubber]

The TV402U captures eveything as a .mpg and not an .avi. I have Sage (2.2) setup to record in DivX Home Theater Quality. The firmware is up to date on the TV402U.
What is also strange is if I play the .mpg file in Windows Media Player, there is not video, only audio. I can play the same file in sage and it will be fine. I have tried reinstalling the DivX codec. I reinstalled WinDVD Creator.
When i first installed the Plextor it successfully recorded to AVI and suddenly stopped working.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Thanks in advance!

[Opus4]

SageTV wraps those avi files in an mpeg2 wrapper so that you can watch the show while it is recording. After the recording is done, it will unwrap the recording to an avi file.

To record directly to avi, set the mmc/enable_mpeg4_timeshifting=false property. (In Appendix A of the SageTV manual.) In the v3 beta, this option can be set in Detailed Setup -> Customize.

- Andy

[mindrubber]

They files never unwrap. They stay in mpeg and cannot be played in anything except Sage. I did change the mpeg time-shift option though, per your advice. I will see how that goes.

[mindrubber]

that seemed to take care of the issue. It is finally making avi's out the files. Thanks for your help!

[prowler2000]

Mindrubber ...

I have two of the Plextor TV402U hooked up to the SageTV 2.2 software. I was never able to get the system to correctly produce avi files. The problem seemed to get much worse once I added the 2nd unit ... but I can't tell for sure. Nevertheless, the "mmc/enable_mpeg4_timeshifting=false" never fixed my problem.

Oh sure, I could reboot the system and it would unwrap a few of the MPG files, but never all of them. To make matters worse, after a few days of recording avi files, the system would switch back to the unwraped mpg files. You are correct, you cannot view them in Media player or power DVD, even with an Mpeg decoder installed since these are not mpeg files, they are AVI files with this wrapper junk around them.

Other than making my system reboot every night, the problem just continues. I upgraded to the 3.0.7 version hoping to fix the issue. The good news, every recording was in a working AVI format. Unfortunately, the 3.0.7 software has a bad memory leak on my system, and after several days I received an error indicating the 3.0.7 software had a problem with the Plextor drivers ... and left me with a 10gig mpg file for the "Iron Chef" show. EVEN WORSE, the most recent recordings have an audio to video sync issue ... right from the start of the show, off by at least 5 seconds. I rebooted this morning ... we'll see how long it lasts. I too have the latest Plextor drivers ... which haven't been updated since Dec 2004. I'm running XPSP2 with all updates.

The 3.0.7 software takes more CPU time, so now my AVI playbacks in Media Player are jittery when recordings are going on. The whole reason I both the Plextors was for AVI files, and thus the disk space savings.

I am very disappointed in the huge amount of time I've had to spend trying to have a stable system that can actually produce avi files ... and then avi files with correct audio to video syncing (had this problem in the 2.2 software too). I use the exact same computers for other things (I have at least 6 more of these) and have absolutely no issues with memory leaks ... or any thing else, so I can only blame the Sage software.

I will say that I've only used the forum for help and not tech support. So if this happens again, I will start a direct line to tech support. I really would just like to give them my system for 2 months so they can work out the bugs in the software.

It is my view that that the Plextors are an afterthought for the development team. I just don’t think they really have run multiple Plextor units on their software over any significant time … otherwise they would have seen all of the issues people in this forum complain about.

I’m hopeful for the version 3 software to finally become the product I was promised when I paid for the software … we’ll see.