Thanks for the detail Jess - that does help!

I suppose this is something that could even change between different driver versions for a tuner?  I was actually using all the exact same tuner hardware (even physically the same) when I was running MCE 2005 and never saw this problem, but I'm sure the driver itself being used in Vista is different than when it was based on XP.

As much as I personally rely on this machine and it's recordings, changing tuners is something I really will have to consider if nothing else is found to help.

So, everyone submit a ticket for you HDHomeRun so the update their driver!!!

Jessica,

Potentially 'stupid' question, but what do you mean when you say 'our next release'?  Is that Vista SP1, a Windows Update Roll-up, or something else?

jon

Any of you that get newer (different) drivers for your tuner and it seems to have an effect, be sure to let us know the results.  Since I'm using old standby Hauppauge PVR-250 tuners and have the problem I'm not personally counting on any "new" drivers - I don't think the drivers for these cards have been touched in years.

 

jrausch:

Jessica,

Potentially 'stupid' question, but what do you mean when you say 'our next release'?  Is that Vista SP1, a Windows Update Roll-up, or something else?

jon

I actually can't say more. I work in a product development team, not support or sustained engineering, so it's fairly obvious that I work on new feature development. New features come out in releases - but we haven't said publicly how we're shipping the stuff we're currently working on. So I feel like it's fair to say there will be a "next release," but I can't tell you more until we release details more broadly.

Plus, what I know to be "true" today will probably change tomorrow and next week and next month. The only guarantee at Microsoft is that whatever the ship date is currently, we won't ship then. :-) (Okay, that's not fair. But it FEELS that way a lot!)

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Matthew Toney:

Any of you that get newer (different) drivers for your tuner and it seems to have an effect, be sure to let us know the results.  Since I'm using old standby Hauppauge PVR-250 tuners and have the problem I'm not personally counting on any "new" drivers - I don't think the drivers for these cards have been touched in years.

Yeah, and this concerns me a bunch, that you're using the PVR-250. We've used that and tested with it internally forever, and I haven't seen or heard of this issue. I'm compiling the list of tuners you guys with this issue see, and I'll ask the relevant feature team to attempt to repro with these tuners and then make sure our code fix actually fixes the bug for all tuners and it's not some other bug that looks like this one.

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I see it virtually on a daily basis.  I've got a pair of PVR-250s in the machine along with pair of VBOX 150 ATSC tuners.  I only see the incorrect duration on shows recorded with the PVR-250s...and it happens regularily with the same 2 shows (PTI on ESPN and the Colbert Report).  The shows are on daily, and I would estimate that 1-3 recordings of each show has a 5 min duration.

 

And are you guys with the PVR-250s on XP or Vista?

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Vista (Ultimate if it matters)...with all latest updates/rollups from WUP applied.

Used the same 4 tuners for 18 mos under XP and never saw the problem...

Yes I'm on Vista as well and like jrausch, I never had the problem with these same tuners when it was running MCE 2005.  (and I'm personally getting close to 20% of the shows I record with this problem - about 1 a day for me)

 

ditto - i have two 250s, vista ultimate, and i never had this problem with mce 2005.

onlydarksets:

ditto - i have two 250s, vista ultimate, and i never had this problem with mce 2005.

Its interesting to hear many of you are having this issue with Vista Media Center with content recorded using your PVR-250s.  Previously I saw many recordings with this issue but these occurred when our Recordings.xml file was Vista incompatible or somehow corrupt and recordings often failed to record altogether.  Basically everything was so messed up that I didn't consider the shows with incorrect durations significant (the symptoms with these were identical to yours though).

Right now our PVR-250 is being used by Vista to record multiple shows daily and we are definitely not seeing this issue at all.

Did any of you migrate your scheduled recordings (Recordings.xml) from MCE2005?  I'm just wondering if the issue could somehow be related to incompatibility of the Recordings.xml file between MCE2005 and Vista.  Even when our Vista scheduled recordings were totally messed up, if I took the same Recordings.xml file and copied it back to MCE2005 and then booted into MCE2005, all of our scheduled recordings worked 100% again.  If I then took the Recordings.xml file from MCE2005 (thinking it might now be "cleaned up") back to Vista, the problems would immediately return.  The Recordings.xml file we are using currently was created from scratch in Vista.  In my experience, Vista doesn't seem to be able to handle larger Recordings.xml files very well, especially if it was migrated from MCE2005.

One issue we are seeing once in a while is a new recording for some reason will only play back in Media Center for about 5 seconds before starting to stutter terribly.  The specific dvr-ms file won't play in any Media Center (even MCE2005).  The same file will play back flawlessly in Media Player  - but there is definitely something specific about these files that makes them not play properly.  In Media Center every time skip, replay, FF, or RW is pressed, the recording will start to play properly again for another ~5 seconds before stuttering.  I don't know if this issue is related, but are any of you seeing this? 

I was considering replacing our PVR-250 with an HVR-1600 or HVR-1800 to try to get rid of this issue.  I was told by Chris Matichuk that the PVR-250 isn't really supported in Vista and it "has issues" (he didn't specify what though).  Here is a quote from him in http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/thread/205664.aspx

ChrisMatichuk:

By the way, I saw PVR-250 listed above somewhere...You should know that Hauppauge is not activelly supporting the PVR-250 and PVR-350 on Windows Vista. The tuners should work just fine...but there are a few issues (again, I'll elect to not digress into these issues here) that will likely not get fixed. If the tuners are working fine for you, then great. But you may want to upgrade to the PVR-1600.

Due to his statement I hadn't bothered to ask about this stuttering issue (I figured the PVR-250 wasn't supported).

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STB w/R5000HD USB I/O, Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4, Quad Q6600, 4.0 GB RAM, ATI HD 3870 512MB, Ultra XVS 600W PSU, 3x SATA 500GB, 2x SATA 300GB, LG GGC-H20L, PVR-250, Toshiba 51H83 (51" HDTV), Yamaha RX-V2400 Amp, 5x Energy Speakers, SVS Sub, Harmony 880 Remote

Well it would sure be great to hear what these known "issues" are with the PVR-250 and Vista, although there are a number of people with the incorrect duration problem and no Hauppauge cards so we know its not PVR-250s only with the problem.

I personally did no recordings migration - my Vista installs have all been fresh and not upgrades.

 

Matthew Toney:

Well it would sure be great to hear what these known "issues" are with the PVR-250 and Vista, although there are a number of people with the incorrect duration problem and no Hauppauge cards so we know its not PVR-250s only with the problem.

I personally did no recordings migration - my Vista installs have all been fresh and not upgrades.

The only one Chris mentioned is it doesn't have the ability to "unrelease" from MCE.  This means it can't be used by other 3rd party applications when MCE isn't using it.  My guess is this is a new feature specific to Vista drivers.  The PVR-250 uses a driver in Vista that was originally written for XP.  There is no Vista specific driver available.

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STB w/R5000HD USB I/O, Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4, Quad Q6600, 4.0 GB RAM, ATI HD 3870 512MB, Ultra XVS 600W PSU, 3x SATA 500GB, 2x SATA 300GB, LG GGC-H20L, PVR-250, Toshiba 51H83 (51" HDTV), Yamaha RX-V2400 Amp, 5x Energy Speakers, SVS Sub, Harmony 880 Remote

Hey all,

Andy posted a work-around in the original thread.  It works great on SD - I have not confirmed it on HD sources yet.


Jessica,

I'm still looking forward to seeing an official fix from Microsoft, though.  If there is a beta test group, I'd love to be involved.

Thanks!