HDPVR Frustrations

[scoful]

OK - I got two HDPVR's and another Moto 6200 and have them both changing channels and such.
After a couple of days of craziness it appears one of the HDPVR's is defective - CPU goes crazy when playing back content from it sporadically - even throught ArcSoft - so I pulled it out of the lineup.

The remaining HDPVR seems to work fine - except when changing channels on the fly. It seems stable if I press stop before selecting another channel - it has never locked up.

It seems like it's usually good for one channel change (watch one show, change the channel once - then the next time...) and then goes into the double spinning circle of death.

I looked around to see if there was a way to issue a stop command between channel changes but found nothing. I have tried both the original demux and the beta one - the results look a little different but end up the same - fatal lock up.

I am running Sage as a service now (and created it's own administrator account to run).

I had hoped I would have less issues with this than with Firewire through UNE...

[scoful]

Ditched service mode - seems to work reasonably (I do use the server for playback).

I have not been able to use service mode since I started doing HD - I really like running the service - if the UI bombs my recordings keep going.

Anybody have any ideas?

[waynedunham]

A couple things to check. Check the output on both of the STB's. Maybe one is set to lock output to 720p and the other is either set to put out the source or locked at 1080i. Maybe the 1080i files are what is causing the cpu craziness? Just a wild guess.

I only have one HD-PVR (plus an HD HomeRun and 2 PVR-500s). I am tuning my STB through a USBUIRT since the built in IR on the HD-PVR won't work since I have other Hauppauge devices on the system.
I'm using service mode with this setup with no troubles.

[CollinR]

Might try it with the same user account you normally use rather then it's own.

[scoful]

After multiple issues with the HDPVR's and disappointment in the picture quality (hard to beat firewire) I opted to return my HDPVR's and reorganize my setup.

I have reconfigured with two DCT-6200's via sgraphrecorder and my server is now headless with SageTV running as a service. I'm still running one SD cable box via serial control and a PVR150. Comskip is now able to run all hours. My overall system performance and stability is much improved.

It is unclear to me why I have been able to convert shows through Sage to H.264 and had no problems with playback on anything, while the HDPVR output seemed to require a lot more CPU resources. Furthermore, the output from one unit required more CPU resources than the other and resulted in choppy playback frequently.