BTV 4 with AIW9800 & ATI HDTV Wonder

[Showdog]

I am having trouble with the HDTV signal studdering and pixelating when watching OTA HDTV? I have all the latest driver from ATI. Any advice on the setup of BTV 4 would greatly be appreciated.

Happy Holidays!

[Rich A]

If you record a digital show and later play it back, does it still stutter?

I'm one of the guys who also had this problem during beta testing.. If you DO have the same problem as me, you mayl have to wait for a fix. Here's something you can try in the meantime. After starting the live HDTV viewing, pause it for at least one or two minutes. Then un-pause it and continue watching. That fixed it for me.

Here's the exact problem. This only happens in LIVE TV. Recorded digital content is fine and plays back normally. (It is possible to have an occassional stutter from time to time with digital signals) But normal stuttering shouldn't happen execpt for once or twice in an hour or two.

See if pausing and then un-pausing the show helps. If it does, then you have the same problem I had.

BTW, my live tv playback now works perfectly. It took a mother board change to fix it however and we still know know why. Before I changed the M/B I tried everything .. Both ATI, and Nvidia video cards, diffterent hard drives, faster CPUs, defragging, running storage as a RAID and a ka-zillion other things.

There are a lot of other things that can ALSO cause stuttering of digital live tv viewing. But first see if you can stop it by pausing the view.

[terpfan1980]

Rich A - I'm curious what mobo you switched to, or is it the system you've described in the sig block?

[Rich A]

Originally Posted by terpfan1980

Rich A - I'm curious what mobo you switched to, or is it the system you've described in the sig block?

Yup it's the one currently shown in my sig. But it will be changed again soon. I'm going to play around with a dual core Athlon and will probably change to one of the ASUS socket 939 main boards in the near future. BTW, I don't really care for the MSI main boards. It was just something that was available quickly at the time. All my other computers use either Abit or Asus for main boards.

I am a retired computer repair shop owner .. and although I sold the business a while back they still let me "hang around". So I generally see what is good and what is bad. And also have some special former owner perks that allow me to "try" a lot of stuff. Actually I'm "rich" in name ONLY .. But I do some consulting for the new owner and he pays me with computer equipment. (life is good) ... Otherwise I'd never be able to afford all these "toys". heh heh

[terpfan1980]

Thanks for the follow up, one more question though if you don't mind, what board were you using previously (when you were having the problems).

Still trying to track possible data points on where the problems might really be.

[Rich A]

Originally Posted by terpfan1980

Thanks for the follow up, one more question though if you don't mind, what board were you using previously (when you were having the problems).

Still trying to track possible data points on where the problems might really be.

The previous board was an NF7-S (ABIT) Usually a pretty decent board.

I think the minor problems I encountered might have been due to having upgraded both hardware and software several times over the last 2 or 3 years and never doing a fresh install of Windows. I've only installed BTV "once" many moons ago .. and have yet to do a full install from scratch. I started when they were in version 2 or something. It's been that reliable and has been running 24/7 for a couple years now. Some time ago I got involved with beta testing and unlike some guys who have a 2nd PC used JUST for beta work, I am using my day to day PVR for all the beta work. Functionality has never been an issue. Just minor "feature" update problems which have mostly been worked out during the beta process.

When I go to the Athlon 64 CPU I'm going to give the system a treat and set up everything new from scratch. (probably should have done that long ago)

But the problem is that this is my one PVR (replaces THREE ReplayTVs) and it's become so reliable and used so much every day that I just couldn't make myself tear it all down for even a few hours. But most shows are in re-runs now .. and I'm all caught up with my favorites .. so it looks like a PC Make-Over is coming up.