I just got a 7 minute recording last night that should have shown as 1 hour.

Using the HDHomerun with the 10-15-2007 software/firmware.

Just updated to the 11-20-2007 drivers, so hopefully it won't happen again.

Ugh....  Any MS folks want to comment here on the latest - are we still sure this is truly a driver issue, and is there any update on the internal code fix that was done and the possibility of it going out?

 

At this point, I don't see a possibility of the change being released outside of a product release. We know it can be fixed in a driver; we also know it can be fixed in our code. If the HDHomeRun change didn't fix it entirely, I'm sure they want to know - we've been talking to them about the fix.

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JessZahn:

At this point, I don't see a possibility of the change being released outside of a product release. We know it can be fixed in a driver; we also know it can be fixed in our code. If the HDHomeRun change didn't fix it entirely, I'm sure they want to know - we've been talking to them about the fix.

I'm pretty sure you've explained this before but what does product release really mean to us end users?

Would MCE2005 RU2 be considered product release or is only a step like from MCE2005 to Vista Home Premium considered a product release?

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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

RU2 was definitely a product release for us. Um....I have no idea how to put it into terms someone outside would understand. If it has a codename? Freestyle, Harmony, Symphony, Emerald, Diamond? Those are our five releases thus far.

Internally, it's the thing the majority of the team is working on at once. The naming of the actual release (Media Center 2005 Rollup 2 v. Vista Home Premium or whatever) isn't all that meaningful in terms of what is a release and what isn't, because releases are named when they're mostly done.

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Using the HD Homerun in QAM mode with VMC 64 bit edition.  Updated the HD Homerun firmware and drivers to 11-20 version about a week ago in an attempt to fix this.  Frequency of the problem has decreased and I thought it had gone away completely until last night when it resurfaced on a recording of "House."  For the 3 people reading this who have never heard of it, "House" is a one hour drama on Fox.  Instead of showing a duration of 6 or so minutes as in the past it showed a duration of about 30 minutes, but still with all the problems of not being able to use SKIP FORWARD and BACK/REWIND/FAST FORWARD.  PAUSE, however, seems to work OK but we gave up trying to watch it.  I'm going to try bobgvavant's (sp?) tool tonight to fix it.

I don't know if the problem lies with MS or Silicon Dust, but would ONE of you please fix this?  From Jess' wording it sounds like its a problem that could be fixed by either party and that MS even has written repaired code to fix this - they just haven't finished testing it to be sure it doesn't break something else.  This is the kind of thing that just kills the WAF, or in my cases the FAF (family approval factor).

Thanks.

P.S., Jessica - I'm sure we all really appreciate your help in these forums and it isn't fair for you to become the whipping girl for MS as thanks for your efforts, but I've really got to set you straight on that "We're not going to fix it because it doesn't affect that many people" stance.  Media Center is why I bought Vista Ultimate and MCE 2K5 before that, and PVR is the biggest factor within that decision.  If the PVR function in Vista doesn't work right then I don't really care that Notepad or Calculator continue to work correctly or that fixing Media Center might break Wordpad.  I'm having problems with the most important (to me) reason for buying it.  I can't imagine taking my Camry to the Toyota dealer with a broken turn signal and having them tell me that too few people are affected by this particular problem so they're not going to fix it for awhile.  I'm one of those weirdos (not really a fanboi, but only a couple notches down...) that actually stands up for MS on most occasions.  I've even been impressed with the speed and reliability of Vista in general, much to my surprise after reading so much negative press about it.  And I've told quite a few people that Vista is actually much better than one would think given all the bad publicity its received.  I think a lot of that bad publicity is/was undeserved.  But don't tell me that a major glitch in the one of the most important features of Vista Media Center doesn't deserve to be fixed promptly because of some estimate about how few people use it.  I USE IT, I RELY ON IT, AND THE FACT THAT I'M HAVING PROBLEMS (ALONG WITH AT LEAST FOUR PAGES OF OTHER USERS) SHOULD INDICATE THAT THIS IS SOMETHING THAT NEEDS FIXED ASAP!!!  Call the fix whatever you want - a patch, a roll-up, a service pack, a product update, whatever.  The terminology doesn't matter to us as long as the new code fixes the problem.  I do appreciate your honesty about this whole process, but the bottom line is that quite a few of us are having problems with one of the most important features of Windows and MS needs to put some effort into fixing it!

PPS - I know I indicated that I'm using VMC with QAM and MS doesn't officially support QAM outside of HP and a few other annointed manufacturers that have the OCUR blessing from the cable N*a*z*i*s.  I've already vented elsewhere about what a slap in the face this is to those of us that prefer to build our own systems and pay a hefty premium for that privelege when we buy retail copies of Windows.  But this problem doesn't seem to be tied to using the HDHR with QAM.  People are having this problem with OTA and even analog cable so please don't remind me that VMC doesn't support QAM.

Jess, do know that I've tried to not be hostile to you personally.  I know there are a million constraints MS puts on you about what you can and cannot say in these forums and, like I said, its not fair to make you the bad gal just for trying to help us out.  But for what Vista costs we deserve at least a good faith effort to fix this problem as quickly as possible.

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vlad

JessZahn:

RU2 was definitely a product release for us. Um....I have no idea how to put it into terms someone outside would understand. If it has a codename? Freestyle, Harmony, Symphony, Emerald, Diamond? Those are our five releases thus far.

Internally, it's the thing the majority of the team is working on at once. The naming of the actual release (Media Center 2005 Rollup 2 v. Vista Home Premium or whatever) isn't all that meaningful in terms of what is a release and what isn't, because releases are named when they're mostly done.

Can you give us any idea when this product release might be available?  Are we talking a few months, a year, a few years, ??

What causes the problem?  Is there anything we can do to fix it until the patch comes out?

I am stumped with our system's behaviour wrt this issue.  For years we never saw the problem with MCE2005 and even at first with Vista.  Now all of our 6 MC systems are experiencing the problem on a very regular basis and I can't think of what has changed.  Right now at least 1 in 10 recordings suffer from this bug making it so these shows are close to unwatchable (partially because DVRMSToolbox's commercial skipping tries to skip through commercials and since skipping is totally messed up it jumps to the end of the show at the first commercial and then we can't get back to where it skipped from).

I understand this sort of bug isn't a priority for Microsoft, but if we could understand why the problem has suddenly appeared we might be able to figure out a work around so my wife and children can watch their shows.  Has something in the source video changed that triggers this bug?

I also have to agree with the previous poster that this is a serious bug that really needs to be patched sooner rather than later.  I don't mind running an untested patch and I'm sure most other enthusiasts don't either.  We'd be happy to provide feedback on a patch and definitely would much prefer an untested patch over struggling with this bug.

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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

No, I can't give you any idea of when the next product release will be available. "Years" though is fairly unreasonable to think, given our history.

I've re-opened the discussion with the sustained engineering team about whether releasing a fix is possible. I know a bunch of people sent me PMs that said which tuners they're seeing this on; unfortunately, most of those people are HDHomeRun users. If I heard from more people who see this on other tuners, it would definitely help with the justification.

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JessZahn:

No, I can't give you any idea of when the next product release will be available. "Years" though is fairly unreasonable to think, given our history.

I've re-opened the discussion with the sustained engineering team about whether releasing a fix is possible. I know a bunch of people sent me PMs that said which tuners they're seeing this on; unfortunately, most of those people are HDHomeRun users. If I heard from more people who see this on other tuners, it would definitely help with the justification.

I have an HDHomeRun, but I rarely have the problem on that.  I have 2 Hauppauge 250s, and I consistently see the problem on those.

JessZahn:

No, I can't give you any idea of when the next product release will be available. "Years" though is fairly unreasonable to think, given our history.

I've re-opened the discussion with the sustained engineering team about whether releasing a fix is possible. I know a bunch of people sent me PMs that said which tuners they're seeing this on; unfortunately, most of those people are HDHomeRun users. If I heard from more people who see this on other tuners, it would definitely help with the justification.

The problem occurs with our PVR-250.

Now that we've got FireSTB recording our HD channels, these no longer suffer from this problem.  Unfortunately, it is the SD recordings with the PVR-250 that include all of our children's shows and all of my wife's cooking shows that tend to very frequently have this problem.

BTW, FireSTB can handle the SD channels too, but there is a bug in Media Center that for some reason can't play them properly (so we can't use FireSTB as a workaround for SD channels unless we use Media Player to watch the SD recordings).

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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

I'm having this problem too. Some recordings should be 75 minutes but the timeline says 49 minutes.

Tried a lot of things like different drivers, reg fix like here http://gbpvr.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Tips/TimeStampIssue#toc4

Nothing works so I hope there will be a solution soon.

My cards are Hauppauge PVR150 MCE with auto installed vista driver 6.0.6000.16408

Same here, this time with Saber VistaView 2020's. Had the same with Club3D ZAP-TV 1001/1101. One thing i noticed, it only happens when two programs are recorderd after each other on the same channel and then only the second recording is suffering from the duration time issue.

I don't understand why, but the problem is definitely getting worse and worse with our system.  The only thing I can think of is something must have changed at the source of our content that makes this bug far more common.

Right now I'd estimate that 50% of our PVR-250 recordings of shows I want to watch end up with a duration of less than 15 minutes and they are a nightmare to watch without fixing them first.  Right now I'm still manually running babgvant's "FixDVRMSDuration" utility on the shows with this issue that I want to watch.  I probably should go through the effort to set the system up so the utility runs on all PVR-250 recordings (but this isn't something your "normal" Media Center custom will do nor is it something we should have to do).

Luckily every recording that is recorded digitally through FireSTB works fine.  I've rescheduled everything I can to be recorded through FireSTB, getting around this bug as much as possible.  Unfortunately FireSTB recordings of lower bitrate SD content still won't play in Media Center so I have to either use Media Player (or anything other than Media Center) or configure FireSTB to only record HD to get around this bug (I have it configured to only record HD since we much prefer to use Media Center using the remote control - my children don't even know how to use Media Player).

Since a large percentage of digital SD recordings won't play in Media Center we are still left without a reasonable work around.  In my situation I either need the "inability to play low bitrate digital SD dvr-ms recordings in Media Center" bug fixed, or I need the "incorrect duration on recordings" bug fixed.

I'm hoping both of these will be fixed in the reasonably near future, but I have to say that these days MS typically takes literally years to fix serious bugs like these.

Jessica, I know MS is a large company, but I don't understand why it takes years to get serious issues like these resolved.  If fixing them properly is so difficult, why not offer a hotfix for Media Center customers using a tool that will restream dvr-ms files to get around the bug.  I believe that Andy's FixDVRMSDuration utility simply uses the SBESource filter to extract the mpeg-2 and audio streams and then uses SBESink to put them back into a dvr-ms file.  Why can't MS provide a simple hotfix utility that will inspect dvr-ms files and then fix them as required?

If all Media Center PCs using PVR-250s, PVR-150s, ZAP-TV and likely other tuners are experiencing this issue, this must be affecting a huge number of customers.  While we are mostly able to still watch the recordings, they are so screwed up that this must be seriously affecting the overall Media Center experience.  This will most certainly affect how people accept switching to Media Center for their TV viewing needs.  Most customers will come to the conclusion that Media Center is clunky, non-user friendly and buggy when they can't skip, replay, fast forward, and rewind without the show jumping all over the place.  They won't understand what the real issue is, but they will know it doesn't work well and they'll ultimately look elsewhere for their PVR needs.

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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

JessZahn:

No, I can't give you any idea of when the next product release will be available. "Years" though is fairly unreasonable to think, given our history.

I've re-opened the discussion with the sustained engineering team about whether releasing a fix is possible. I know a bunch of people sent me PMs that said which tuners they're seeing this on; unfortunately, most of those people are HDHomeRun users. If I heard from more people who see this on other tuners, it would definitely help with the justification.

I'd like to confirm that this issue is more serious as you think. I'm from the Netherlands and i've seen numerous posts in Holland from people with the same problems. Also in Germany this is a known problem. We don't have HDHomeRun here in Holland and Germany. Maybe MS didn't know these problem exists because most of us thought it was a hardware fault (most users built their own system and with the variety of hardware you could easily think this is hardware related). So please look into this again and try to provide an update/fix/patch. If neccesary i can provide exact details about hardware and how to reproduce the failure.

Thanks in advance.

babgVant:

There aren't any work arounds to stop it from happening, but you can fix the files after they are created using this tool.

I updated FixDvrmsDuration to accept a  3rd parameter to indicate allowed variance between reported and calculated duration.  It will only process the file if the % variance is greater than the number provided.

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