TV tuner locks up during playback

[archcommus]

I have a Theater 550 PRO TV tuner. After about 10-15 minutes usually of live TV viewing, the video playback will freeze and I'll have to End Task the program. Then when I reopen the program it says it can't find a video signal and I have to reboot the computer to get it back.

I was told this might be a heat issue since the tuner chipset does not have heatsink or fan, however this shouldn't really be a problem since I am running the card in a large, well-ventilated ATX case with two open slots below the TV tuner. Also, last night I tried running live TV from Media Player Classic and it worked fine for over an hour and a half. However it almost always freezes in SageTV or Beyond TV.

I was wondering if maybe an IRQ conflict was part of the problem. Here is a screenshot of my IRQ settings from Device Manager. Do you see any issues?

Thanks.

 

[Peter]

"IRQ sharing issue" is the first thing you'll hear from the support drones, and the LAST thing that ever happens in real life. Remember, PCI devices (and their PCIE, AGP and chipset-integrated siblings) must, by order of the PCI standard, share interrupt - and if there aren't any SERIOUS driver fsckups, they do. (And if they don't, you need a new driver, not a new IRQ arrangement.)

 

[xtknight]

The Windows video capture system is very unstable unfortunately. (You have to reboot the PC if a capture program doesn't end conventionally.) If it works in MPC it's probably not a problem with the card, unless SageTV and BeyondTV use stuff on the card that MPC doesn't. I'd recommend disabling all acceleration in SageTV and BeyondTV and then seeing if it's any more stable.

 

[archcommus]

Thanks. You were right in assuming that ATI support are the ones that mentioned a possible IRQ issue. I'll rule that out for now per your advice.

I also just tried GB-PVR and it froze also. Ran MPC again for a bit and again, no freezing. Maybe it's an issue with programs that do time-shifting?

What kind of acceleration are you referring to exactly? I will try playing around with that when I get home later tonight.

Thanks again guys.

 

[xtknight]

Doesn't the board have an onboard MPEG2 encoder?

 

[archcommus]

Originally posted by: xtknight
Doesn't the board have an onboard MPEG2 encoder?

It does but I wasn't aware that could be disabled. Considering it has worked fine with MPC (which probably doesn't utilize the hardware decoder at all) disabling that may do the trick.

 

[archcommus]

Well I disabled MPEG4 timeshifting in SageTV and it seems to have fixed it. However I can still pause and rewind live TV, so what do you think this disabled exactly?

Do you think the reason that was screwing it up was because the chipset was getting too hot or because of a software/Windows instability?

 

[archcommus]

Well the problem has not gone away. I really think it's getting too hot during live timeshifted TV since the TV card is encoding video in real-time, and since it doesn't seem to freeze in Media Player Classic which of course does not do timeshifting. Can timeshifting be disabled in SageTV? It doesn't seem like it.

 

[Peter]

If you're receiving digital TV, then the card isn't actually "doing" much, just transporting the already compressed digital video stream into the system.

Timeshifting differs from realtime viewing in that the stream goes to main RAM and then onto HDD, and another stream from the HDD into another location in main RAM and onto the graphics card from there. Realtime viewing goes from TV card into RAM onto the graphics card, or even from the TV card straight onto the graphics card.

So if your machine is unstable in timeshifting mode, I'd rather research into the area of RAM and HDD reliability.