Is your Beyond TV working as advertised on a multitasking PC?

[jchapel]

I have purchased Beyond TV 3.4 with a back in January of this year with a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-USB2. Since then I have tried it on numerous computers and countless configurations supposedly compatible that well exceed minimum requirements. I have purchased hardware, installed, reinstalled to no avail. I downloaded 3.5 and followed installation instructions carefully by making a clean install removing WinTV with HWClear and reinstalling the WinTV driver provided at SnapStream Download page prior to running the 3.5 setup. This has just made matters far worse.




So I would like to see just how many of us have Beyond TV working as advertised in a multitasking environment.

Juan Chapel

[flavius]

Juan,
Hm, what do you think is a multitasking pc? I have to to admit, I have yet to see one that works. Are you trying to run BTV 3.5 as a service?

[Eric3a]

Flawless.
Away on business trip for the whole month... And can use web admin, and all BTV functions just fine.
Meanwhile the server is being used in it's normal computer capacity as well as multimedia center.
I access it remotely viw PC Anywhere, and it's not rare that the computer ends up downloading something while uploading to my hotel, playing music or video locally for my wife.
When I am around I even play recent games (that's what I got the ATI 9800 for) and don't always shut BTV down since CPU for recording is minimal.

I can't remember my last crash.... Must have been a couple months ago during a beta version?
Eric

[jchapel]

No, I'm not trying to run as a service nor am I trying to run multiple tuners. I trying to keep it as simple as possible in order to get reasonable results.

Multitasking? Nothing serious, In my case an Windows XP SP2 PC connected to a home network, behind a firewall, running anti-virus software, and on a broadband connection. Being able to ocasionally check mail, or run minor applications while BTV is in the task bar (Not recording). I would not expect to be able to run resource intensive applications (CADD for example) and BTV concurently.

My problem has been 3.4 will eventually crash hard while running no other applications, without warning, with no error messages, no logs or rpt file, or errors in the Windows Event Viewer. 3.5 will crash the same way within 20 minutes of startup.

If I uninstall BTV and reinstall the WinTV drivers and applications all is well, and computers stay up untill I shut them down.

This has been true on a 2.4 Dell with 1gig of memory, a Sony Multimedia 2.6mhz Laptop PCG-FRV27 with 512meg memory and several PC's I have built from scratch specifically for BTV

No, I'm not trying to run as a service nor am I trying to run multiple tuners. I trying to keep it as simple as possible in order to get reasonable results.

The problem has to be a software conflict given I have tried numerous hardware configurations without any luck. I just have had no luck identifing it and it doesn't help not having any tech support.

I want to clarify this thread. I love the idea of BTV and will keep trying to make it work or wait for a stable version. I am not in any way trying to bash Snapstream and its hard working developers. I'm acutually looking for a large yes count in the poll to give me some incentive and hope.

I know tech support is busy with this highly unstable version - epg data dissappearing, poor video, and so on and so on. Just read the threads here. So I imagine they are taking on the easy fixes first and ignoring the hard cases to clear their load. It just would be nice to get some indication that I'm in some queue somewhere and someone will get to me eventually.

[jchapel]

Thanks Eric this gives me some hope.

[richt]

I use my BTV server to read email, brwose the web, make CDs, edit video etc. I don't have time anymore but I even played a game or 2 once upon a time. All while BTV is running.

[flavius]

Before I setup a dedicated machine, I tried to run it on my new HP machine. 3.4 was not a problem. Any 3.5 beta would run for days, or twenty minutes, you'd never know. That's the machine I using every day for email, browsing..
Ever since I have the dedicated box, I have no reason to complain anymore. In my case I think it had to do with firefox and xpcom. But I don't have the desire to reproduce the error on the new box - if you know what I mean.

Since you seem to have enough machines: install one from scratch, just xp with sp2. Then the tuner with drivers, then BTV...

[jgourd]

By multi-Tasking I am assuming that you mean that it is not dedicated to just BTV. If that is the case then yes it is working just fine.

If you meant Multi-CPU then the answer is no. I have had to disable all but the first CPU in my system to make it stable. I am building a dedicated CPU to run BTV in the future.

[nanook105]

If you meant Multi-CPU then the answer is no. I have had to disable all but the first CPU in my system to make it stable. I am building a dedicated CPU to run BTV in the future

This seems to be more of an XP issue that anything specific to BTV. I have two PCs with hyperthreading, and both are prone to lockups and crashes. Mostly related to mouse movement and interacting with windows basics (start menu, windows explorer, task bar, etc). One is dedicated to BTV and media (editing/burning, etc). The other is a gaming PC. Turning off hyperthreading before installing XP and applying SPs resolves all of the issues.

[Pilk]

I have had 3.4 work flawlessly ...

The only problem I had, was not getting BTV to work with the pVR-250's newest drivers I had to revert back to the .18 drivers.

3.5 though ... well that's a diffrent story.

[kabel]

mine works flawlessly. I have had 3.4 running for nearly 2 months with 0 downtime using pvr usb2. It's not dedicated box either,i game with it, burn dvds all the time, and use it for other needs.

I put 3.5 onit and it ran fine, the quality was just horrible, so went backto 3.4
funny thing is when i went back to 3.4 i used a pvr 250 with the newest driver from sage tv site, and it works fine.

AMD 64(3000) nv3 250mb 1gb ram bfg6800gt 256mb video 160gb hd liteon dvd+-rw happauge pvr 250(16)

Before I moved it to the AMD box, which i did because with AMD cool and quiet, it runs better then an intel dedicated box, i had run on an intel 3.2c, with HT enabled, and i did not have any performance or program problems with 3.4
I have built up a dedicated box with intel 2.4c, but have not brought it online yet.

I'm sorry to hear you have had issues, but mine has only stopped once, and it was because the power went out and i did not have it on a ups at the time, and that was on me.
Do you have other programs that you also have installed on the other computers?

[Queaks]

Hi!

I have it running on a Dell P3 933 MHZ machine with 512 MB of memory. BTV has been flawless witrh the Hauppage USB2 external tuner/decioder My video card has 64MB.
The machine also acts as a file server, and desktop for browsing, email and using MS office. I can use it as a desktop while it is recording and although see an occasional pause , it works. My son has gamed on it while it was recording and had infrequent issues. I do however defrag my terrabyte of disks weekly and am religious about running spybot search and destroy as well as antivirus.... It even serves as the "server" for BTV link.

Perhaps the issue wiith performance is an renegade task. I know that while this machine handled a Maxtor 250 GB USB drive with no performance issues. I had to de-install the "One touch" software on my wife's 2.5 GHZ HP machine because it ate up 70 +% of the CPU cycles due to some conflict. Removing the optional software removed all bottlenecks. Check task manager to see if some "safe" software is eating CPU cycles.....

[phils]

I purchased Beyond TV 3.4 last month and could never get it to work. Tech support is nonexistent they have never responded to any of my requests for assistance. I just purchased the Hauppauge PVR-250BTV hoping it would solve my problem. It didn’t help at all, and I contacted tech support again and again no answer. They had no problem taking my money. I have upgraded to 3.5 defragged, virus scans, etc. all to no avail, and tech support still will not answer an e-mail or phone call.



This is what happens when I try to run BTV, maybe someone here can help.



After I install BTV and run the setup wizard all appears to go all right up to the select the cable tier I subscribe to then I get the following message. “USER ALREADY HAS MAXIUMIN NUMBER OF LINE UPS� at this point everything stops and I can’t go any further.



I also never received the additional tuner licenses I was suppose to get with the purchase of the Hauppauge PVR-250BTV.

Phil

[flavius]

phils,
Go find 'Brett' in the memberlist, PM him.

[davieboynj]

I've had various versions since 3.2 on machines as low as 1.0 Ghz and haven't really had significant problems.... Up until last week, my PVR was always my main computer. the non-significant problems i've had are below:

3.4, 3.5 demanded that i "upgrade" my aureal vortex 2 drivers, which made me lose my optical output. unacceptable... i left the drivers on, or reverted, but occasionally BTV would bark at me.

with an older hauppauge card (maybe the first they put out) i would get garbled audio after a full week of recording w/o a reboot.

running an ehome wonder card (great deal) and recording a lot of programs, I have noticed that the program never really gets around to squeezing the shows, and also never gets around to making the smart skip settings. I hope in the future they're optimised. I can't believe that smart skip takes as much time as it does...