Cool -  those of you with the HDHomeRun,be sure and post your results as to whether or not this new driver makes the issue go away!

(I'm about to pull the trigger on 2 Hauppauge PVR-1600 cards to replace my 2 PVR-250's - I sure hope changing cards and drivers helps on the Hauppauge end as well)

I installed the new driver a few days ago. Sadly, I'm still occasionally having the issue. I've reported back to SiliconDust, but perhaps it really isn't a driver issue.

I'm having the same problem, using Vista Home Premium and Media Center.

I have an AMD X2 4400, and one Hauppauge PVR250.

I'm going to try the fix at the bottom of this page to see if it helps anything, but any word on a fix from Microsoft would be great.  I'm a little relieved that this problem isn't just me, but it still isn't good!

kcsnow:

I'm having the same problem, using Vista Home Premium and Media Center.

I have an AMD X2 4400, and one Hauppauge PVR250.

I'm going to try the fix at the bottom of this page to see if it helps anything, but any word on a fix from Microsoft would be great.  I'm a little relieved that this problem isn't just me, but it still isn't good!

The 6 minute incorrect length issue is a driver specfic issue with the tuner you have.  It's not a bug in Media Center.   Without getting too technical, what's happening is that the driver is telling Media Center something incorrect about the buffer of data it's giving it for the video stream, and that leads to incorrect data being written to the DVR-MS file.  The only way I know of for you to fix this is to make sure you have the latest driver for your tuner.  If you already do, then you'll have to complain to the tuner manufacturer that their driver is doing this and it needs to be fixed.  Otherwise, you'll just have to get a different tuner. 

I happen to know for a fact that the ATI TV Wonder 650 tuner driver does not have this problem. 

Mykroft:

The 6 minute incorrect length issue is a driver specfic issue with the tuner you have.  It's not a bug in Media Center.   Without getting too technical, what's happening is that the driver is telling Media Center something incorrect about the buffer of data it's giving it for the video stream, and that leads to incorrect data being written to the DVR-MS file.

Please, get technical.  The more people understand about the specifics of the problem, the more likely that it will be addressed.

I actually don't remember the specifics, there was an article somewhere about it that I read.  I'll see if I can find it and post it here.

onlydarksets:

Please, get technical.  The more people understand about the specifics of the problem, the more likely that it will be addressed.

it will also be easier to design [more] efficient workarounds until the underlying issue is resolved.

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onlydarksets:

Please, get technical.  The more people understand about the specifics of the problem, the more likely that it will be addressed.

I second the request for more technical information.

Although we can blame drivers, the facts that this problem wasn't present in MCE2005, most of the tuner drivers have been migrated with Microsoft's "blessing" untouched from MCE2005 to Vista and  Microsoft made a change in Vista that now suffers from this problem, suggest Microsoft is at least partially responsible.  At least some of the effort towards a solution should fall on Microsoft (perhaps as a minimum working with hardware vendors to encourage them to fix the drivers).

It is, after-all, Microsoft's product that looks bad when only Vista's Media Center has this issue, while everything else is able to work fine with the current drivers.

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Ok, I found where I read about this orginally.  It's actually another thread on this forum where Jess Zahn of Microsoft explains that they have found the issue.  Here's a link to the actual post where she does some explaining on the problem.  You can read the entire thread here.

Essentially, this is what Jess says:

It happens when a capture driver (tv tuner driver) doesn't flag the first sample as a discontinuity. Some tuners do, some don't. So there are two possible fixes: We made a code change to be more robust when a capture driver doesn't do this, and that's what we'll release in the future. (No matter what the capture driver does, we'll force the first sample to be discontinuous.) Or, IHVs can update their driver to make sure this happens.

So it looks to me that short of a fix by us or your tuner manufacturer, the only thing you can do is change tuners, which is likely not a good option. Plus, we don't know which tuners exhibit this and which don't - it was originally thought that just digital cable tuners did it, but obviously we know now that's not the case.

Hope this helps some.