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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ixian" data-source="post: 695208" data-attributes="member: 54932">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.</blockquote>

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