Playback problems of MyHD (transport stream) files

[ibglowin]

Have had a MyHD PC tuner card for about a year now. Absolutely love it. Great way to Archive OTA HDTV. I just added the DVI daughter card. PQ is sweet.

I am having a problem with playback on my PC. I am using a Dell Optiplex, 2.4Ghz P4, 1GB RAM, 128MB NVIDIA graphics card, 2 internal Maxtor 160 GB 7200RPM 8MB buffer IDE HD's.

The problem is that the files will only playback if they are on the main "C" drive. If I move them to the "D" drive (same BUS) or an external Firewire drive they stutter and skip and hang.

Is there a setting somewhere that might cause this problem on the PC? CPU usage is nowhere near maxed out when playing these files so it must be a data transfer rate problem somewhere in the BUS or the Mother Board.

Any ideas would be much apreciated.

[Mark Lamutt]

DMA setting maybe on the other drives? Have you ever been able to play the transport streams from the other drives? What happens if you record to the other drives - does playback still stutter? Have you tried a clean install? What about network connections - is your HTPC connected? Have you tried disabling the connection during recording and/or playback? That's about all I can think of off the top of my head. If you haven't already, I'd definitely head over the the HTPC forum at AVSForums and post there about this.

[cdru]

The problem is that the files will only playback if they are on the main "C" drive. If I move them to the "D" drive (same BUS) or an external Firewire drive they stutter and skip and hang.[quote]When you say same bus, I assume you mean the same controller and both drives share a cable? If so, that could be a possible problem. IDE/PATA specs only allow one device on a chain to talk at a given time. With 2 drives sharing the same cable, they will both compete for time to transmit data, slowing down throughput. Try moving your "D" drive over to the same cable as your CD rom drive.

[quote]Is there a setting somewhere that might cause this problem on the PC? CPU usage is nowhere near maxed out when playing these files so it must be a data transfer rate problem somewhere in the BUS or the Mother Board.It could be the DMA as the post above said. Go into your device mananger and find your controller device. It will likely be under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers. Click on the Primary IDE Channel device and then Advanced Settings. What does it say the channel is running at?

I would also check with Dell to see if there are any driver, chipset, or bios firmware/updates available. I've seen significant drive performance due to a Dell firmware update, however that was with a server and not a desktop.

[ibglowin]

DMA setting maybe on the other drives? Have you ever been able to play the transport streams from the other drives? What happens if you record to the other drives - does playback still stutter? Have you tried a clean install? What about network connections - is your HTPC connected? Have you tried disabling the connection during recording and/or playback? That's about all I can think of off the top of my head. If you haven't already, I'd definitely head over the the HTPC forum at AVSForums and post there about this.

No, can't play back on either the other internal drive or external firewire without stuttering. I looked at the drive settings when I went home for lunch just now. Device 0 is set to DMA. Device 1 is set to PIO and thats the only option I seem to be able to select.

I wonder if I have the drives set up correctly now. I had the "C" drive set up as "Master" and the "D" drive didn't have any jumper on it. When I tried to set both to cable select or "C" to Master, "D" to true Slave, the computer wouldn't boot. Got either a No OS found or a error message on boot up.

Clean install of what? Windows XP or MyHD? When we set up this system, it was a clean intstall of the OS followed by MyHD.

I'll try AVS and see what I can find out if you have no other ideas.

Let me know.

Thanks,

[Mark Lamutt]

I was talking about a clean install of the MYHD application and drivers. But, a PIO setting on device 1 will cause you problems.

I don't have a MyHD card, so I can help in only a limited capacity.

[ibglowin]

Well we got it working!

I had the IDE cable mismatched, the Black/Grey connector were swapped backwards (1st problem) That allowed me to set up both drives to cable select properly. 2nd problem was the BIOS, The 2nd drive was somehow turned off! Got it switched on and rebooted and the 2nd drive is now Ultra DMA as well. Thanks to all and especially the great customer support at Digital Connection(http://www.digitalconnection.com/) where we bought the card from. Talk about service AFTER the salel! BTW, they have the MyHD card on sale right now for $239 and the optional DVI card for $69, This is about $100 less than last year. If you can recieve OTA HD and would like to record/archive this is one of the best for sure.