Satellite Stream Stops working on HD (2 Viewers)

[mm1352000]

Signal strength has never been a problem to me, I'm usuing a 1M dish in a 45CM area.

Nice.
...though be aware that there is such a thing as signal being too strong.

This never used to happen with the Skystar USB box either, although sensitivity matters.

In general it isn't fair to compare different tuners like that. Different hardware (chips, board designs), firmware (settings, algorithms), drivers => different behaviour. What is fine for one is not guaranteed to be fine for another.

The corruption happens at any time after 20 minutes usually, sometimes as low as 10 and sometimes later. Most of the time it is 20 minutes in though.

My guess would be that the time of the problem is relative to the time of an event occurring on your PC (eg. virus scan) rather than to the start of the recording. If I'm right, the time - 10 minutes, 20 minutes... whatever - is nothing specifically to do with the tuner and everything to do with when the recording starts in relation to this troublesome event.

Hard Drives are 30 gig free on the system SSD and 600gig free on D:.

Okay, that should be fine since you're recording to D... as long as you're not running some I/O intensive process involving the D drive (eg. virus scan, video editing) while the recording is occurring.

...Windows Defender...

This (along with MS Security Essentials) can be really troublesome if not configured correctly.

I'd recommend to run resource monitor during the recording and monitor the HDD load.

 

[g00se]

Well next scheduled recording is tonight so I'll monitor hard drive usage.
I have tested this without any windows security software running with no difference in the result.

 

[DrunkenSquirrel]

Hey, I noticed you responded to the thread.
My problems seem to have stopped, I reinstalled mediaportal several times, and have also started using a different HDD to record to.
I think it's likely the new HDD solved it, even though the old one was a 7200rpm 1TB which shouldn't have had a problem recording to, and couldn't find anything else using the disk either.
Maybe some disks just doesn't like being recorded to.
It's worth a try moving the recording folder to another HDD.

Now that I've said this I'm waiting for it to go bad again XD
Hope this helps.

 

[g00se]

Did some monitoring whilst recording was taking place and hard drive activity was normal. Had a screenshot app capturing the screen during the recording and yes, this recording only got to 3 minutes before breaking.

 

[mm1352000]

Hmmm, that seems reasonable.
Did you happen to check the signal stats at the same time?

I know you said that you have a larger-than-needed dish. Its just that if the problem is not HDD or signal then we move to much less common issues - overheating, DPC latency... things of that nature.

Ultimately we're looking for a pattern as always. The pattern will lead to the cause.

So, are there any patterns that you've noticed that could tie the problems to a cause? Weather, temperature, other activities on PC... ???
Does this problem occur when using the tuner in other software? (...if you don't use the tuner in other software, now is the time to try it because at this point I can't see that MP/TV Server are in any way causing this... but we need to avoid assumptions)

mm

 

[g00se]

I have ran WMC server successfully although not long enough I don't think for a serious test, just a week or so of recordings.
Hadn't really considered temperature issues. My CPU runs at 30C idle and 45ish when playing something like Battlefield 4. I have a pci cooler that I can put adjacent to the PCIE slot that's occupied by the DVB carr so will try that next. I've also cleaned out XBMC and reinstalled for what its worth.
Can't thank you enough for your responses and if I do get to the bottom of this I'll post back.

 

[g00se]

It appears to be a common issue that TBS cards disappear from device manager, not sure why using WMC would stop that but it occurs with both MP and NextPVR. A few google results point to GPU drivers causing it. I hadn't previously checked Device Manager but now when the problem occurs the card is no longer listed. At least it's some progress and obviously not confined to MP.

p.s. PCIe sleep is turned off in power management.

 

[wizard123]

It appears to be a common issue that TBS cards disappear from device manager, not sure why using WMC would stop that but it occurs with both MP and NextPVR. A few google results point to GPU drivers causing it. I hadn't previously checked Device Manager but now when the problem occurs the card is no longer listed. At least it's some progress and obviously not confined to MP.

p.s. PCIe sleep is turned off in power management.

TBS cards usually disapear from device manager when they are starting to fail in my experience i had 3 which all did the same after X amount of time, moved to a dvbsky card and never had an issue since.

 

[g00se]

Well I've finally got a solution that is working 100% of the time, when the card hasn't been used for a while the problem occurs on the first record of a new session, signal will appear to degrade between 1 and 20 minutes into recording, the second recording following that will be fine (sleeping?). So now I'm scheduling a 20 minute manual recording before all my schedules,. Was wondering if this can be made any easier or it's possible to fix the drivers/settings using this information - season recordings at different show times are going to be a pain. I've tested this for a week over about 20 recordings, the first always corrupts, the second is always fine.

tl;dr : the card needs to tune twice after not being used for a while.

 

[mm1352000]

Was wondering if this can be made any easier or it's possible to fix the drivers/settings using this information

Unfortunately I can't think of anything we can do to "fix" this. We certainly can't fix the drivers - only TBS can do that.

One of the key things you've discovered is that this problem is not specific to MP (ie. you found it also affects N-PVR). IMO you'd do well to follow up on that. This discovery should tell you that the cause might be something related to the tuner, the PC (hardware, OS, drivers other software that is running in the background), your satellite dish, cabling, LNB... or some other "shared" environmental thing. It at least tells me that anything we would do would just be a workaround for a problem that would be better fixed at the source.

If I were you I would check your dish alignment, cabling and LNB. For example, it is possible your LNB local oscillator frequency drifts with temperature change. After the tuner has supplied power for awhile the LNB will warm up => LOF change => signal lock marginalised.

Definitely report the problem directly to TBS and see if they can help you. They're in a much better position to help than we are.