initial support for Hauppuage HD-PVR (4 Viewers)

[Blue Energy]

Thanks for that, Ixian.

However, as a live TV DVR it's not reliable enough to where the non-tech heads in your house are going to want to deal with it.

After a while you will end up like 99% of the rest of this thread - wondering why you bothered, and thinking, well, a cable box for live TV and the occasional recording isn't that bad, or expensive.

Yes - that is exactly what I would like to avoid. The truth is that the cable issue box is a very good deal, money-wise. I would not do this to save money. I'm looking for control and a single source for everything.

P.S. Also, just give up now on the idea that you can use either of the blasters built in to the HDPVR. Just take my word for it, you don't even want to bother going down that road. Save your sanity and spend $30 on a Microsoft brand MCE remote/remote dongle.

MythTV can use the ir blasters in the HD PVR, but in my (seemingly endless) research it seems that even that has potential problems and requires a specific version of Linux. So - thanks for the bird-dog. I will keep that product in mind.


Is it possible to use MediaPortal as a front-end for MythTV?

Whoops - I had written the above some time ago and didn't post it until now. In the meantime there have been two more interesting posts. Wile E. and Ixian - it would seem that you have very different experiences with the same basic system. What is different in your setups? Something must cause one to work so much better than the other - what do you think it is? Is it possibly horsepower?

 

[garry]

My HD-PVR has actually been very stable (even using DD via DirectTV) until recent builds. Maybe I got lucky with a good hardware revision of the HD-PVR. Maybe part of that is my 4am scheduled reboot & power cycling of everything.

I actually think it was the most stable when I first got it working - since then channel change speed has improved and overall stability has decreased. Lately recordings on the HD-PVR will die before the show ends and won't work again until I reboot everything.

I've always run my own builds that are slightly tweaked from the latest SVN, mainly to support the Adaptec AVC-3610 tuner. I may merge some old HD-PVR code back in to my build and see what happens.

The rest of my hardware is pretty medicore - Athlon X2 3800+, 2GB, GT220, HDHomeRun & Adaptec AVC-3610.

 

[ixian]

Honestly, like I mentioned in passing before, I think the set top box you are using is a huge factor. WilE, for example, uses DirectTV, or at least he used to (4 of them, if I remember). In my case, I had many, many more problems with my Dish Network receivers than I did with the Scientific Atlanta cable boxes my provider uses. It wasn't just me - at least two updates have been released for the HDPVR which address unspecified issues with Dish receviers, so clearly there's a problem they know about.

It comes down to how your source is delivered, as they are not equal between providers. Dish and DirectTV both use different mpeg4 compression schemes for their content, and different levels of compression, even between channels and commercials. Cable providers have yet another scheme. While they are output as analog signals from the box and input to the HDPVR as analog they are then transcoded to h.264 and problems can, and do, arise. The problems mostly seem to manifest around live TV streams, due (probably) to buffering, etc. As you have already read though, some folks even have problems with recordings, although in those cases I suspect the HDPVR hardware itself - for the first year after they were released (May 2008) these devices were very, very finicky, had heat-related issues, and went through several hardware revisions. By now I believe they've more or less stabilized, since revision E1 (mid-2009), plus more mature driver support.

Throw in to all that above the fact that codecs are half art and half science with many HTPC's and you end up with a situation where you can't be sure it'll be 100% stable for live TV. Maybe you'll have the right magic combo like WilE does and everything will work, or maybe you'll end up like a few posters here who could never get it to work at all. Odds are you'll end up with, like I said, a setup that mostly works, but unless you live by yourself or have a house full of like-minded tinkerers even one or two failures a month in the middle of a live show will be enough to get you to chuck it.

I've run in to a surprising number of people here and on other forums like AVSForum who simply avoid live TV streams period - they watch everything recorded, even if it means letting a program start for about 10 minutes then watching the recording from the beginning (which MePo allows you to do). There's been a ton of good, solid, even ingenious work put in by a lot of folks here for free and I don't mean to belittle any of it - it's amazing what they've accomplished. In the end, there's only so much that you can do, though.

 

[mdg78]

Hi,

I just wanted to share my experience. I don't come around to this thread much now because my HD-PVR is running very stable. With previous versions of MP, the main issue I had was on restart, I would have to manually restart the TVservice and cycle the HD-PVR after the restart was complete. Since I upgraded to 1.1.1, I have not had this problem at all. I have minimal problems watching live TV. Occasionally I begin to get mild skipping, but if I pause it for a second, then resume, this seems to resolve the skipping. I haven't missed a scheduled recording in about a year, which was the biggest initial problem that I had. Otherwise, my HTPC is my main TV running MP with an HD-PVR. THis is just my experience, though, so take it as an n=1. It seems others may have different experiences. I use FTR, which is a great tool as well.

I do want to echo what ixian said about the stock blaster with the HD-PVR. I had all kinds of problems with it, not changing the right channel, missing a recording because it missed a number or didn't send the right signal. I purchased a USB-UIRT, and it was the best money I could have spent on the system. I was hesitant at first to spend more money on a system that was giving me so many problems at the time. Once I did, it made a world of difference.

Also thanks to everyone who's worked on this to get it where it is today, I wish I had some of your abilities to help!

Michael

Edit: I should also say that I am using cox cable for my service and SchedulesDirect for EPG data.

 

[sjeffrey]

Well I'm pretty much like ixian.
I'm on BellTV which use same STB as Dish, so there's always been issues there. I though letting go of DD would fix it but that also failed. I set my box to do PCM only and even used analog cables for sound, no good... It's much better but not 100%. I'll watch liveTV and for a 30 minute show the image/sound will lock up or stutter say 3-4 times. It's hard to give exact numbers because we mostly end up switching directly to TV. I do plan on trying to bring my PC at a friend with cable (Roger's) houses to see if the same issue exists.
Hopefully I'll find some time to test that out. I can switch to Rogers anytime so if it's more stable then I will probably do that. The real problem is that MediaPortal is such a great interface, I want to do everything from there. I hate switching from TV to PC all the time. I got a nice Logitech Harmony 900 that does it all in a macro but still...

 

[WileECoyote]

My experience is pretty much like Garry's, with the exception that mine is still stable and I dont reboot but every month or so (Until needed.)

I had Directv up till Jan of this year but then switched to AT&T Uverse. I tried to set up DD after the switch, but ended up with the same issue of stuttering when you started/changed a channel. So I turned it off at the STB and all works great.

I guess its been a while since we have had a big discussion, I presumed everyone was having the same experience as Garry and me. It really stinks that you guys are having issues and not able to use it day in day out. Even my Zotac clients work great without issue. I guess like Garry, maybe I got lucky with good hardware?

 

[ixian]

Let's start by defining "working" More than a few posters here, like mgd78 above, would say they are working just fine, even though occasionally they have to do stuff like pause a live broadcast for a few seconds to fix a stutter. See, in a lot of houses, that isn't "working". Like mine. That kind of problem is especially annoying if you just have the TV on in the background while you're in the kitchen and don't have the remote handy, or you have your in-laws over and you aren't around when it happens, etc. See, regular cable TV boxes, they don't do that. They don't glitch, or require you to pause them, or stop and restart the program, etc. Maybe once in a great blue moon, I suppose, anything is possible, but it's pretty rare.

 

[mm1352000]

Let's start by defining "working" More than a few posters here, like mgd78 above, would say they are working just fine, even though occasionally they have to do stuff like pause a live broadcast for a few seconds to fix a stutter...

I'm not sure that problem is unique to the HDPVR. You might want to keep an eye on this

 

[Blue Energy]

Interesting... And, Wile E. - it's been a few days but I think I remember that you're running Raptors (very fast disks) is that true? If you don't mind me asking - what is your disk subsystem? How about everybody else? Can we isolate what the successful users have in common? Maybe everybody who wants to should indicate their:

1.) level of MePo success
2.) computers processor
3.) computers amount of ram
4.) computers disk make and model.

It's possible that the streaming problems have nothing to do with HD PVR at all.

 

[WileECoyote]

Interesting... And, Wile E. - it's been a few days but I think I remember that you're running Raptors (very fast disks) is that true? If you don't mind me asking - what is your disk subsystem? How about everybody else? Can we isolate what the successful users have in common? Maybe everybody who wants to should indicate their:

1.) level of MePo success
2.) computers processor
3.) computers amount of ram
4.) computers disk make and model.

It's possible that the streaming problems have nothing to do with HD PVR at all.

My level of success is very high (in regards to the HD-PVR.)

Yes, I do run a 10k rpm system drive (for my OS, which is also used for timeshifting.)

All my system specs are up to date in my profile....