Hauppauge HD-PVR support

[Terminal]

Got a wild hair and decided to try the new drivers. Haven't noticed any problems, I did have to manually adjust the picture settings as others have mentioned.

Had a "could not terminate process" after a recording today but it did not lock up my system. It threw up an error but the file played fine, even though it said it was 0 MB, and it did not effect any other recordings. I ran MPEG2Repair on it and now it is fine. Not sure I can say this will be the norm though. It seems I have seen these could not terminate recordings in the past with no real problems. Sometimes, however, it will stop my system from receding on any tuner until I shut down and re-start BTV, sometimes a complete re-boot of my system.

Like most things with the HDPVR you can never say for sure without a month or two of running it.

[Cal]

for those of you who are using the newer drivers. What did you have to change your

Brightness
Saturation
Contrast
Hue

setting to in order to get a good picture again?

I've been playing with the settings but I have not found what I want yet.

[mpp_mpp]

I went to web admin and changed the advance stetting of the video input for contrast and saturation to 25 (from 50) This worked for me.

[NickHark]

Originally Posted by Terminal

Had a "could not terminate process" after a recording today but it did not lock up my system. It threw up an error but the file played fine, even though it said it was 0 MB, and it did not effect any other recordings. I ran MPEG2Repair on it and now it is fine. Not sure I can say this will be the norm though. It seems I have seen these could not terminate recordings in the past with no real problems. Sometimes, however, it will stop my system from receding on any tuner until I shut down and re-start BTV, sometimes a complete re-boot of my system.

I have been vacationing in Myrtle Beach for the last week and have to deal with my system over the INTERNET. I have had these "could not terminate" errors and I could not remotely reboot my system.

Yesterday, after throwing off the error at 8AM no recordings could be made all day.

There were 39 BTV RecordingEngine processes in the task manager and a similar number of ASP .net 2.0 #1309 errors in the event manager.

I tried to reboot the system and it hung at "shutting down Windows" until 1AM when the HD-PVRs were rebooted.

I would like to be able to force BTV to shut down in spite of these hanging processes.

Trying to stop the BTV processes in task Manager does not work.

Does anyone know how to do it? This has occurred a couple of times so I am convinced that BTV has to be separated from the HD-PVRs to allow the system to get control of itself.

[Cal]

Originally Posted by mpp_mpp

I went to web admin and changed the advance stetting of the video input for contrast and saturation to 25 (from 50) This worked for me.

Thank you. Those numbers seem to do what I was looking for. I put the other two back to 50 and changed just your suggestions to 25. I think my problem was I was playing with the Brightness in addition to the these.

[mpp_mpp]

Originally Posted by NickHark

I have been vacationing in Myrtle Beach for the last week and have to deal with my system over the INTERNET. I have had these "could not terminate" errors and I could not remotely reboot my system.

Yesterday, after throwing off the error at 8AM no recordings could be made all day.

There were 39 BTV RecordingEngine processes in the task manager and a similar number of ASP .net 2.0 #1309 errors in the event manager.

I tried to reboot the system and it hung at "shutting down Windows" until 1AM when the HD-PVRs were rebooted.

I would like to be able to force BTV to shut down in spite of these hanging processes.

Trying to stop the BTV processes in task Manager does not work.

Does anyone know how to do it? This has occurred a couple of times so I am convinced that BTV has to be separated from the HD-PVRs to allow the system to get control of itself.

I guess I am lucky when I am away and this error occurs and I try a remote shut down my system will blue screen 1 hour and 23 minutes after I start the shutdown process (I had to due this last weekend)

According to my research the reason windows task manager will not kill the process is the process has a driver actively open.

A couple sites have recommended to try some of the sysinterals to kill the process like pskill (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s...rnals/bb896683) or process manager (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s...rnals/bb896645)
I have not tried these and there is mixed opinions if this is works online I end up waiting for the blue screen restart after I start the normal restart.




Now for the completely geeky - only for the truly tech people - take a look at this blog about troubleshooting unkillable process on ruining a stack trace to see truly what driver has the system stuck http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussi...processes.aspx

[Terminal]

Originally Posted by NickHark

I have been vacationing in Myrtle Beach for the last week and have to deal with my system over the INTERNET. I have had these "could not terminate" errors and I could not remotely reboot my system.

Yesterday, after throwing off the error at 8AM no recordings could be made all day.

There were 39 BTV RecordingEngine processes in the task manager and a similar number of ASP .net 2.0 #1309 errors in the event manager.

I tried to reboot the system and it hung at "shutting down Windows" until 1AM when the HD-PVRs were rebooted.

I would like to be able to force BTV to shut down in spite of these hanging processes.

Trying to stop the BTV processes in task Manager does not work.

Does anyone know how to do it? This has occurred a couple of times so I am convinced that BTV has to be separated from the HD-PVRs to allow the system to get control of itself.

I have come up with a method to deal with this remotely, but I am seeing the same thing. Quite often now, as a matter of fact. Nothing I tried will kill the process and it will not re-boot, sticks at shutting down windows. I have my PC plugged into my web switch. I have to log into my switch and kill power.

Next time this occurs, and I have some time before the next recording I will mess around with the stuff mpp_mpp posted. Maybe a batch can be created and it can be added to my routine I use to reboot the HD-PVR.

[NickHark]

Originally Posted by Terminal

I have my PC plugged into my web switch. I have to log into my switch and kill power.

I think if I could plug my HD-PVRs into a web switch, this problem would be resolved.

What web switch do you use?

[mpp_mpp]

I had the error last night an pskill was unable to end the stuck btv recording engine process

[Terminal]

Originally Posted by NickHark

I think if I could plug my HD-PVRs into a web switch, this problem would be resolved.

What web switch do you use?

I have the web power switch II. From here, they now have a Web Power switch 4.

[Zogg]

The web switch is cool. I'm thinking about one myself because it would let me do some things outside of BTV.

I guess I'm lucky, I never run into the multiple process problem. I do have a batch file to kill and restart BTV using taskkill, with this command: taskkill /f /im btvd3dshell.exe . I use it on my main Link machine occasionally and it always works. I have it set up on my BTV server but I've never used it.

Eventghost has a sample web server, with remote control buttons. I set this up on my BTV server (actually on my Link box too) and I programmed a couple of buttons to run my kill BTV batch file, and another to run my HDPVR power cycle batch file. So I can log in remotely to that control interface and do a manual restart if necessary.

Currently I use an X10 power switch to cycle the HDPVR's but that web switch is really cool.

[mpp_mpp]

I use a USB Net Power 8800 - to remotely restart my HD-PVR,

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?inv...0US-BP&cat=PWR

it is power outlet you can control by the computer connect to the usb port. one disadvantage is any time you computer restarts or the controlling application starts it automatically turns off the power to the device. (this is not the best device, software but it was cheap and it does work)


Also note to the wise never install the driver for the HD-PVR while it is connect to the usb net power device it as the installer send out a command to all the usb devices and it caused the power to be shut off while it was uploading the firmware to the hd-pvr (I ended up having to RMA that device back)

[Jakesty]

Not sure if this will help you, but when you try to restart your computer, are you using the Shutdown command from command line?

Windows Shutdown:
shutdown -r -f -m \\192.168.x.x -t 01
Or try the one from PS Utilities:
PSShutdown -r -f \\192.168.x.x -t 01

These seem to help me out since they do a 'forced' restart.

[ijourneaux]

Since I am using EventGhost, I configured the X10 addin to power cycle the HD-PVR. At least in my case, if you power cycle the HDPVR, all of the extra BTV recordingservice entries in the task manager shut down by themselves.

Right now the power cycling in manual but I did work on a way to trigger the Recycle HD-PVR event based on the error in the BTV log. I never finished testing it though.

[Terminal]

I don't think I tried shutting the HDPVR to see if the service would close. I will have to try that next time I get the error.