TeVii S480 Dual DVB-S2 HDTV PCIe supported? (4 Viewers)

[mm1352000]

Hi!

Would be really great If you could help to narrow it down!! Please find attached the last crash dumps. With the Mystique S2 Dual 1.1.0.28 it did not happen the last 3 days anymore, but in the past I also had some crashes, after the system was coming up from standby. I also had it, after 1 or 2 seconds, when a recording has started. The first seconds were recorded successfully. With all the newer drivers I only need to do some channel switches and there it is - the beloved blue screen. 1.1.2.45 at the beginning was also looking good, at least with manual channel switches, but when waking up from standby it was crashing, too. With my IRTrans module I made a stress test, that wakes up the computer and put it to sleep again after 40 seconds in a loop. The 1.1.2.45 was crashing after some minutes, when it had to grab epg. Without grabbing epg it was working well all the test time(3 1/2 hours), constantly switching off and on again. Now, with the 1.1.0.28 and the reinitialize feature disabled it's looking stable again - it has also succeeded in the on/off stress test.

Many tuners including my own Pinnacle 7010ix (x 2) have issues waking up from standby or hibernate. In my case the tuners sometimes disappear altogether. That happens on startup also - tuners just don't appear. Very frustrating! Can you confirm that you *only* get BSODs *after* the computer wakes from standby?

There is also another issue, that might come from the Mystique - in every recording there are a few positions in the movie, where the data stream seems to be corrupt. The receiver losses the hdmi sound signal and the picture is broken. But, this are only very few short moments, so it is not the biggest show-stopper. Does anyone have the same problems with a Mystique Satix S2 or any other card?

How good is your tuner's signal strength and quality? Also, does the sound get lost and picture break up at the same position in the recording every time you watch it? (In other words, if you rewind back to before the corrupt section and then play again, does the corrupt part still have problems?)

Just wondering whether the issue is in the recording file itself (because signal dropped out, HDD couldn't write fast enough etc.), playback (HDD file read speed issue) or HDMI "handshaking" issue (HDCP)...

I also just had another thought about your Tevii tuner. Maybe you could try using the DVB-S network provider instead of the generic one to see if it helps. You can find this in TV Server configuration:

1. Expand the TV Servers section.
2. Select the TV Server that has the Tevii card.
3. Select the first Tevii tuner and click edit.
4. Select the DVBS network provider in the preferred network provider field.
5. Repeat for the second Tevii tuner.

If you find that it doesn't make a difference then change back to the generic one.

[Edit: in answer to your earlier question about recommended tuners, it is hard for me to recommend a good tuner for you because New Zealand doen't have access to the same tuners that you have in Germany. Generally many people seem to be happy with the DigitalEverywhere and DigitalDevices tuners. I also don't see too many issues with the Technotrend tuners (*don't* buy a "premium" one - they are not yet supported!!!). I recommend that you get other peoples' opinions to narrow down your choice, then make sure you find at least one user who uses the tuner you decide to buy. In your case make sure to ask them about standby/hibernate (and CI/CAM support if you also use that). It is sometimes just luck of the draw . Good luck! ]

 

[alexirion]

AW: Re: TeVii S480 Dual DVB-S2 HDTV PCIe supported?

Hi!

The BSODs depend on the driver. With the newer one, I also get the BSODs just by switching the channels with the remote in less than five minutes (so not a standby problem).
With the 1.1.2.45 I didn't suceed in getting the crash by channel switching, but I had many crashes when the computer woke up and has just started a recording.
With the 1.1.0.28 everything seems to look better.
The signal strength and quality values reported from the Mystique driver are a bit strange. Watching ZDF HD I had 100% strength and 0% quality. The values might not be correct, in newer drivers they also changed something in quality and strength reporting.

Sound and picture breaks up at the same time, so the picture could also be the case, that sound is stopped. If I rewind it stucks at the same position.
I doubt that the HDD speed is the issue and CPU usage during playback is less than 10%.
I also don't think its an HDMI problem, when I play a bluray with PowerDVD, I don't have this problem.
I will try the DVB-S network provider and have a look if recordings with the Tevii have the same picture/sound dropouts.

Kind regards,
--Alex

 

[Roberdin]

I checked the last three dumps and they were all the same. Unfortunately the STOP error was a machine check exception (0x124), which are notoriously difficult to debug. This error is triggered at the request of the processor hardware, and not the kernel, which is why Windows gives you little information to work with. In this case I can tell you that the processor issued a request for some data from the L0 cache, and it was not happy with the data that came back for some reason. (Specifically, the WHEA error record gives a BUSL0_SRC_ERR_M_NOTIMEOUT_ERR (Proc 0 Bank 0) error.) Someone more experienced with driver debugging might have a better shot at fixing it, but probably not from the dump files alone.

Usually people will tell you that when this happens, you need to replace your CPU -- but due to the error's predictability, it is unlikely to be the case here. I suggest you forward the logs to the TV card manufacturer together with what you've told us.

 

[alexirion]

Hello,

thank you very much for your analysis so far with the Mystique S2 Dual. I will send the crashdumps to digital devices and dvbshop.

This time, I was testing the Tevii S480 again with some recordings over night with time between to hibernate and resume. 10 recordings did work, and as the movie that I really wanted to see was coming it didn't work anymore! The computer was restarting it self before after a blue screen happened and in the TV recordings dialog, the Tevii cards were not detected, that's why recording could not start at 20:15. Could you have a look at the new crashdump I attached, along with the logs. The two recordings, that have failed should have started at 20.15 ARD HD and ZDF HD. The previous recording ended successfully at 19:15. The crashdump file is from 19:28. After the crash, the system has restarted (19:28:53) and the Tevii card was found. The system went to sleep and woke up again at 20:13 for recording, this time the cards were not found after 5 seconds.
So it looks, that this time the system was crashing during hibernate? Last activity before the crash was:

2011-01-04 19:24:40.717773 [DVB EPG timer(33)]: dvb:grab epg...

Did it crash during epg grabbing? And why did the computer not go to hibernate at 19:20, (it should go to sleep after five minutes of inactivitiy and the recording ended at 19:15 and epg grabbing was not set to prevent standby).

Would be very thankful for any further help in this. I really want to make the system stable ...

--Alex

I checked the last three dumps and they were all the same. Unfortunately the STOP error was a machine check exception (0x124), which are notoriously difficult to debug. This error is triggered at the request of the processor hardware, and not the kernel, which is why Windows gives you little information to work with. In this case I can tell you that the processor issued a request for some data from the L0 cache, and it was not happy with the data that came back for some reason. (Specifically, the WHEA error record gives a BUSL0_SRC_ERR_M_NOTIMEOUT_ERR (Proc 0 Bank 0) error.) Someone more experienced with driver debugging might have a better shot at fixing it, but probably not from the dump files alone.

Usually people will tell you that when this happens, you need to replace your CPU -- but due to the error's predictability, it is unlikely to be the case here. I suggest you forward the logs to the TV card manufacturer together with what you've told us.

 

[Roberdin]

To be honest all I am doing is opening your crash dump in windbg (freely available), typing !analyze -v and seeing where it leads me.

This time it looks like it was your graphics card driver (atikmdag.sys), which apparently you updated in October? Might be worth a look to see if there is a new update. The only other person I could find (via Google) who had an error triggered by atikmdag+0x48dac (module name atikmdag.sys, memory address 0x48dac) turned off DEP (Data Execution Prevention) and that purportedly solved his problem. But that wasn't a scientific test and I'm sceptical.


I still suspect your TV card drivers are to blame.

 

[mm1352000]

To be honest all I am doing is opening your crash dump in windbg (freely available), typing !analyze -v and seeing where it leads me.

Thanks for that - was wondering what you were using

I still suspect your TV card drivers are to blame.

I do too, although I guess there is an outside chance that the video card driver is a contributor if alexirion is using DxVA (hardware accelerated video decoding) and the stream isn't entirely compatible (or maybe even if signal quality is poor). That is far *far* ***far*** less likely than something like memory corruption though.

@alexirion: You may want to check your HDD and memory for errors using CHKDSK and memtest. To test the video card driver issue you can try different video card drivers and/or other video codecs that don't support DxVA.

[Edit: ...and if you are "overclocking" by any chance then you might want to consider testing at stock speeds...]

 

[alexirion]

AW: Re: TeVii S480 Dual DVB-S2 HDTV PCIe supported?

Thank you, Roberdin, next time I will try to read the Crashdump by myself.

The short interruptions during playback occur since one year of testing with the Mystique Dual S2- so this problem is not new. Besides, they happenend also with the Tevii. I will tryout another video decoder and have a look if other decoders can handle the faulty places better. When I enable "Don't drop discontinued packages" the sound didn't fail at this certain faulty positions, but the picture gets blocky artifacts, which are then not going away. If the picture would only fail for a shorttime and sound continues playing, it would be good.

Would be just curious, if other users have the same problems with short dropouts - with either the same channels (ARD HD / ZDF HD) or other channels in other countries??

I also wrote Tevii an email about the standby problems with their card, but they mentioned, that they can not do anything for Mediaportal as a third-party application. They told me, that they delivered everything to the Mediaportal developers, what they need. So, here we have the typical case of "finger-pointing" ... Now, I send the Tevii back, because it was not more stable than the Mystique and only intruducing more problems to me. Looks like it needs some additional years, until it is just to plug a card in and everything works! Uuh, if graphics cards would be as stable - no one could use a computer!

Maybe I'm going for trying a different motherboard sometimes. Does anyone have a Mystique Dual S2 with current drivers working and no standby resume problems or blue screens during zapping? If so, I would be interrested in the system configuration??

Kind regards and may thanks,
--Alex

 

[mm1352000]

Re: AW: Re: TeVii S480 Dual DVB-S2 HDTV PCIe supported?

The short interruptions during playback occur since one year of testing with the Mystique Dual S2- so this problem is not new. Besides, they happenend also with the Tevii. I will tryout another video decoder and have a look if other decoders can handle the faulty places better. When I enable "Don't drop discontinued packages" the sound didn't fail at this certain faulty positions, but the picture gets blocky artifacts, which are then not going away. If the picture would only fail for a shorttime and sound continues playing, it would be good.

Would be just curious, if other users have the same problems with short dropouts - with either the same channels (ARD HD / ZDF HD) or other channels in other countries??

Does this happen with all channels, or only with some. It could indicate a codec problem, signal problem, or slow HDD. The fact that enabling "don't drop discontinued packets" makes a difference leads me to think it is a signal problem.

I also wrote Tevii an email about the standby problems with their card, but they mentioned, that they can not do anything for Mediaportal as a third-party application. They told me, that they delivered everything to the Mediaportal developers, what they need. So, here we have the typical case of "finger-pointing" ... Now, I send the Tevii back, because it was not more stable than the Mystique and only intruducing more problems to me. Looks like it needs some additional years, until it is just to plug a card in and everything works! Uuh, if graphics cards would be as stable - no one could use a computer!

Oh man! I am sorry for your troubles. Companies that do that make me ***very*** angry!
They are right that they sent us their "API" (which is what allows us to make TeVii tuners work at all), however I don't think this is an API problem. I assume you're still getting the BSODs with only the Mystique connected? Can you post TV Server logs please directly after the next BSOD.

Earlier you said:

The 1.1.2.45 was crashing after some minutes, when it had to grab epg. Without grabbing epg it was working well all the test time(3 1/2 hours), constantly switching off and on again. Now, with the 1.1.0.28 and the reinitialize feature disabled it's looking stable again - it has also succeeded in the on/off stress test.

What happens if you:
- use 1.1.2.45
- leave EPG grabber enabled
- change the "delay in seconds before TV Server detects cards" setting in TV Server configuration (General section) to 90 seconds

 

[pellegj]

New driver version available TeVii S480 fix (Diseqc & HDTV), perhaps it could help.

 

[alexirion]

Re: AW: Re: TeVii S480 Dual DVB-S2 HDTV PCIe supported?

Hi!

I installed 1.1.2.45 again and changed the delay to 90 seconds. I sucessfully recorded a movie with the driver and also did some chanal zapping without a crash. Then I started refreshing the EPG and started the on/off test, that wakes the computer up and puts it to sleep with an interval of 180s. After a few minutes I had the BSOD again, it appeared at 22:35:09 (when the computer crashes the lcd display with the time freezes), but the crashdump (010811-14437-01.dmp) was saved at 22:48, when I restarted the computer. It was directly crashing again after reboot (010811-34578-01.dmp from 22:52). Please also find the attached logs:

2011-01-08 22:34:56.881835 [DVB EPG timer(11)]: dvb:grab epg...
2011-01-08 22:48:34.500000 [(5)]: TV service: Starting

So, it crashed right away during grabbing?

Regards,
--Alex




What happens if you:
- use 1.1.2.45
- leave EPG grabber enabled
- change the "delay in seconds before TV Server detects cards" setting in TV Server configuration (General section) to 90 seconds[/QUOTE]