initial support for Hauppuage HD-PVR (3 Viewers)

[ixian]

Thanks for the guide there ixian. I'll definitely follow that when I can. In fact, I saved it somewhere so I won't forget.

At the moment I don't have satellite, but I will be getting it in the future. I was hoping that in the meantime to have the PVR act as a passthrough for my AV switch which has a VCR, game consoles, etc. on it.

The Arcsoft TME program works just fine. I just don't know what to do with the TV Server to make MP act as a passthrough.

Thank you for the help. The Arcsoft software really is confusing sometimes.

I could be wrong, but I'm not sure TV Server will do what you want. It's meant to buffer and record video from a tuner or capture device - straight passthrough (so, I assume, you can simply get a video view inside of MP of the output from the HD-PVR) is not something it was really designed to do. I could be wrong here, but if, for example, you just want to have one interface - MediaPortal - to use on your PC to forward video/audio from an Xbox game.... I don't think that's gonna work.

You may want to check out something like DScaler or it's derivatives, that I believe does do video passthrough.

 

[Squega]

Ahh, that makes sense. The TV server is meant for TV after all.

I'll look into it later. I'll be receiving satellite soon so this isn't an immediate problem for me. I can at least use your guide to help me on that.

Thank you for the help once again.

[EDIT] Actually, there is a button called 'Add S-Video Channels' when you select the PVR in the TV Servers screen. It adds CVBS, RGB, S-Video, and YRYBY channels to the config (image of channels attached below). I think this might be support for using the capture ports as channels. When I try to tune into any of these channels in MP the program stops responding but I can still hear the sounds made in MP when I press a button on my remote. I have the TV config set to use the Arcsoft codecs.

 

[ixian]

Ahh, that makes sense. The TV server is meant for TV after all.

I'll look into it later. I'll be receiving satellite soon so this isn't an immediate problem for me. I can at least use your guide to help me on that.

Thank you for the help once again.

[EDIT] Actually, there is a button called 'Add S-Video Channels' when you select the PVR in the TV Servers screen. It adds CVBS, RGB, S-Video, and YRYBY channels to the config (image of channels attached below). I think this might be support for using the capture ports as channels. When I try to tune into any of these channels in MP the program stops responding but I can still hear the sounds made in MP when I press a button on my remote. I have the TV config set to use the Arcsoft codecs.

I believe Garry mentioned that he never got the other ports of the HD-PVR to work, it always uses the component inputs by default. I'm pretty sure that setting does nothing, or worse, breaks things

 

[chesh]

Question for all the rest of you with an HD-PVR. I noticed last night that when I was recording something with the HD-PVR and timeshifting with my HVR-1600, I had a hell of a lot of stutter in my videos due to slow write/read times on my drive. Yes, I know, everyone says to have your timeshift buffer on a separate drive from your recordings. My question to you guys is, would a 40-80gb SATA drive be sufficient enough for this, or should I got with a small SSD for my timeshift buffer? What are the rest of you using?

Edit: So, I started doing some reading about SSD drives, seems that they really aren't worth the money right now unless you're willing to make all sorts of tweaks to the OS (especially for XP). So, should I just go with a 40-80gb SATA drive to solve my issue?

 

[ixian]

Question for all the rest of you with an HD-PVR. I noticed last night that when I was recording something with the HD-PVR and timeshifting with my HVR-1600, I had a hell of a lot of stutter in my videos due to slow write/read times on my drive. Yes, I know, everyone says to have your timeshift buffer on a separate drive from your recordings. My question to you guys is, would a 40-80gb SATA drive be sufficient enough for this, or should I got with a small SSD for my timeshift buffer? What are the rest of you using?

Use a Ramdisk. Instructions are in the manual.

I use RRamdisk myself, the first one they list. 2gb gets me about 17-18 minutes of timeshifting. If you want more, well, Ram is cheap Also, a Ramdisk will use the extra memory whether your OS is 64 bit or not, so go hog wild.

I would not recommend wasting an SSD on the timeshift buffer.

 

[garry]

Question for all the rest of you with an HD-PVR. I noticed last night that when I was recording something with the HD-PVR and timeshifting with my HVR-1600, I had a hell of a lot of stutter in my videos due to slow write/read times on my drive. Yes, I know, everyone says to have your timeshift buffer on a separate drive from your recordings. My question to you guys is, would a 40-80gb SATA drive be sufficient enough for this, or should I got with a small SSD for my timeshift buffer? What are the rest of you using?

I'm guessing everyone who thinks they have stuttering due to disk throughput has other issues - maybe virus scanning or something else, who knows.

I timeshift/record to the same 1TB SATA disk as my OS with multiple tuners (HD-PVR, Adaptec AVC-3610 dual analog) and have no issues. I used to have a HVR-1600 and HVR-1800 as well and never had problems with concurrent ATSC/HD-PVR/analog recording & timeshifting. Windows performance counters (disk queue, reads/writes per second) show little disk stress.

 

[ixian]

Good point - Now that I think about it, after I moved to the latest SVN I just used the default timeshifting directory on the disk and I haven't had any stuttering issues either.

I do have the recording and timeshift directories exempted from scans in nod32, you might want to take a look at your scanner as Garry suggested Chesh.

 

[chesh]

I'll try removing the AV tonight as maybe that's an issue. Any other suggestions you may have garry?

 

[sjeffrey]

Question for all the rest of you with an HD-PVR. I noticed last night that when I was recording something with the HD-PVR and timeshifting with my HVR-1600, I had a hell of a lot of stutter in my videos due to slow write/read times on my drive. Yes, I know, everyone says to have your timeshift buffer on a separate drive from your recordings. My question to you guys is, would a 40-80gb SATA drive be sufficient enough for this, or should I got with a small SSD for my timeshift buffer? What are the rest of you using?

Edit: So, I started doing some reading about SSD drives, seems that they really aren't worth the money right now unless you're willing to make all sorts of tweaks to the OS (especially for XP). So, should I just go with a 40-80gb SATA drive to solve my issue?

SSD is also a bad idea since they have limited number of times you can write to them.

I also get stuttering and I couldn't find the cause, even ramdisk would stutter.
My quick fix for this is to pause the timeshift for 1 second and resume.

 

[ScaryBob]

Turn off Indexing Service in Drive Properties for all drives. If a disk optimizer/defragger is running it could also create disk throughput issues. Some other disk utilities and drivers can slow down disk access. Check anything that is suspect by disabling or uninstalling it. I also disable System Restore for all drives.

Some real time virus scanners and firewalls can cause issues. To see if they are a problem, disable them temporarily and see if the problem goes away. I would not run a HTPC without antivirus software and firewall but a change in products might be necessary.

I too use a single disk for the timeshift buffer and recordings. The virus scanner is set to low priority at a time when recording is not likely. It is also set to scan only critical areas of the C: drive. The disk defragger is set to low priority. Some virus scanners and disk defraggers can be set to only run when the system is idle.

On a side note, I have a Bell (Dishnet) satellite DVR that can record two programs while playing back one or two others and/or maintaining a disk buffer for time shifting. It shows no evidence of disk throughput issues while doing this. The software being used is proprietary and runs on embedded Linux, not Windows.