Hauppauge PVR 250 Stuttering

GregGreen

Golden Member
Dec 5, 2000
1,681
3
81
Today, my PVR250 started having issues with television playback (both live, and things that were recorded after the issue started). It is almost as if the frame rate is dropping terribly low or there is not enough horsepower all of a sudden to decode the video. Have tried reinstalling drivers several times -- including a couple different driver versions. DVD plays fine as does shows that were recorded in the past few days. Anyone have any issues or experience with fixing such an issue

Hardware
P4 3.0c
Hauppauge PVR250
ATI Radeon 9000Pro
512mb pc3200 ddr
4 7200rpm sata drives in two different raid arrays
Intel D865PERL mobo
SageTV 2.0 for DVR software -- issue is also apparently with the included WinTV software or VLC

EDIT I also tried turning HyperThreading off in the BIOS -- no luck with that.....
 

DaveSimmons

Elite Member
Aug 12, 2001
40,730
670
126
Could be a hard drive issue (retries from failed writes), make sure you have any files on the HD you care about backed up.

Could be low space / heavily fragmented drive but I wouldn't expect that to matter with hardware encoding card like the Hauppage where the data is already compressed before it's written.

Could be a software issue, something in memory, I assume you've looked at task manager to see if anything is using a lot of CPU?
 

GregGreen

Golden Member
Dec 5, 2000
1,681
3
81
I don't know about the hard drive issues, mpeg2 and xvid files that are already written play fine. I'm not really sure about what other measure could be used to rule that out.

In the process of defragmenting the drives now -- 2 out of 3 partitions done now. Didn't notice an improvement.

CPU utilization is below 10%. Memory is using around 500-600mb -- this is not unusual and has never been a problem before. SageTV using 100mb as a Java program is pretty extreme, but I don't think that could be the root of the problem since it has worked up until now.

On a good note, I have gotten VLC to play fairly well, although with a bit of macro blocking. Unfortunately, I think playback in SageTV and WinTV has actually gotten worse.