Hauppauge PVR-500 crashes computer

[pontus]

Hi all!

As soon as I start to capture TV-signals with my Hauppauge PVR-500 the computer crashes. I have tried a number of operating systems (Windows XP Pro SP2, Ubuntu Breey, Open Suse 10, Knoppmyth, Fedore Core4) but the problem remains in all of them. HOWEVER there is one exception. In Windows XP Media Center 2005 the capturing works fine! I would rather use Media Portal than MCE2005 and would love to get my system up and running.

This is my system setup:
ABIT AV8-3rd Eye (VIA K8T800 Pro/VT8237)
AMD Athlon 64 3500+
Hauppauge PVR-500 MCE
Inno3d, NVIDIA GeForce 6200, 128 MB
Gail 2*512 MB

I'm starting to think that the crashes has to do with the combination of the PVR-500 card and my ABIT AV8-3rd eye motherboard. Apperently there is a known problem with PVR-500 + ASUS A8V-Deluxe and just like my motherboard the ASUS board is based on the VIA K8T800 Pro chipset.

Is there any success stories with the combination of PVR-500 and ABIT AV8-3rd Eye?

Do you have any solution, or perhaps another explination, for my problems?

How come that MCE2005 works!? Is it possible that MCE2005 overrides some BIOS settings that fixes the crashes (for exampel, I have seen that the IVTV driver in Linux automaticly changes the latency timer from 32 -> 64)?

All sugestions are warmly welcome, I'm getting desperate here!

[johnbobjamesson]

I just copy what I wrote in a different thread (that you could have found doing a search on pvr500.... ;-)

/quote

Try to set the pci latency timer of the pci bridge and the tuners of your pvr500 to 0. I had exactly the same problem. Now, I use the pci latency tool to set the latency for those three entries (pci bridge (the only bridge with a latency of 32) and the two tuners) every time the computer starts. You have to do it also after every wakeup (pvr-scheduler does that for me, starting pci latency tool via cli).

It's sick and hauppauge could easily fix that problem in their drivers, but it obviously happens only to the kt266 and km266 chipsets by via.

Find the PCI Latency Tool here: http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=951

Hope it works for you, too.

J

\quote

[johnbobjamesson]

Oh, just saw that it works on mce2005 for you. It probably can't be the same problem then, you might try it nevertheless.

I have a pvr500 running fine on Mediaportal, though, so it's not a general MP problem.

J

[pontus]

Great tip! I will try it out as soon as I get home from work and come back with a report of the result. Sorry if I missed your previous posts on the same problem.

[pontus]

The latency timer settings for my PVR-500 was the source to my problems. As mentioned in the original post I noticed that the IVTV driver in Linux automaticly changed the latency timer from 32 to 64 at initiation. At some point I changed the defult settings in BIOS to 64 and setting them back to 32 (or lower with the PCI Latency Tool) solved the capturing problems. Without your pointer to the PCI Latency Tool it would have taken me alot more time to find out. Thanks again for the help!

[MJGraf]

Could you please post, what latencies all your devices show in the latency tool? I already tried a lot - changing latency in the bios, changing it with the latency tool, but it's still not stable...

I have a NVidia 6200 AGP card and a Belkin Pre-N Wireless card in addition to my PVR 500. So besides the devices from my Asus A7V266-E Board, there are aditionally the following devices:

From the PVR-500: PCI-to-PCI-Bridge and 2 tuners
From the WLan: PCI-to-PCMCIA-Device and the WLAN-card itself
and of course the NVidia-card.

Don't know, what devices are exactly there from my MB (cause I'm at work now), but there's at least a sound-device and all the other standard devices.

What latency did you use for all these devices to get a stable system?

Thanks for any help!

[johnbobjamesson]

I set my video card (fx5200) to 64 (which was at 264 before...), the PVR500 pci-pci bridge to 0, also the pvr500 tuners to 0. The rest stays at default, which means that pci devices are set to 32.

J

[MJGraf]

Thanks a lot! I'll try these settings as soon as I'll be at home again...

[MJGraf]

Well, seems a lit more stable, but still BSODs.

However, this was the first time that I could record one channel and watch another with my PVR 500. Unfortunately my happyness was gone after about 5 minutes because of heavy stuttering and finally a BSOD...

My Belkin Pre-N Wireless card has still a PCI-Latency of over 250... The same as my NVidia Card had before I manually set it to 64. Could this be the problem?

[johnbobjamesson]

Sure it could, try it out, play around. There's no reason why your WLAN card should have a 250....

J