Recording's play fine and then change to solid colors

[lharris428]

I've got a weird issue where Google isn't giving me any decent hits. My mother has had a Media Center PC for a while now and she's moving to Florida this week. Before she leaves I decided to build her a new machine especially since the community she's moving to provides basic analog cable free as part of it's common's fees (it's one of those fancy gated communities where you have to be over 55 to live there).

Anyway she's had a retired from my job, Dell Precision 370 with two Hauppage Wintv-PVR 500 tuners for the longest time... but its hot and loud... so I took one of my old boards and built her a new machine.

Quick Stats:
Motherboard - MSI 785GT-E63
CPU - Phenom II X3 740 with the core unlocked
Video - OnBoard Radeon HD 4200
Tuners - Two Dell brand Angel II Dual TV Analog Tuners and one Dell brand Angel I tuner (now removed) off of Ebay - One I have used before and it worked fine.
Storage - OS is on an intel 350 series SSD - Video storage is a SATA 500GB Seagate HD
Windows 7 Ultimate

So with this build it seems to work OK for while... then suddenly, on some recorded shows, it will play just fine for a few minutes and then the screen goes to a solid color (red, green, blue, orange), but you can still hear the audio. It doesn't happen right away so I figured perhaps she had a bad tuner. To test that I used the guide to pick a channel, watch it for a second, set it to record so the tuner would stay on it, then used the guide to check another channel.. rinse repeat until I hit a tuner conflict... Sooo after doing that each tuner appeared fine which disappointed me. I figured that perhaps it has to record for a while before it acts up... so I let them record an hour and nothing... all the recordings were fine.

At this time there were actually six tuners, two Dell Angel II's and an original Dell Angel... so I removed the older Angel card since it came from Ebay and I wasn't sure if it was any good. I also noticed that video and media center UI wasn't smooth once you got four to six tuners going so I also popped in a fanless Nvidia GT 220 that I had laying around (I used to run this in my very first HTPC) and the video and UI are now smooth. I sent my mother and step-father packing and a few days later they called me said it's happening again... Drat...

After work I am driving to their house and I'm going to pull some RAM so that it's got 4GB and pop in the old Hauppage cards and see if it's any better. The thing is, I'm running out of time and I want to avoid putting the old Dell Precision 370 back into production.... I was hoping some of you have seen this before. I'm almost sure it's gotta be a bad tuner... but I am not sure and can't get it to reproduce. Also I am going to check, but these are the hauppage cards that bork at the 4GB limit. Can I have exactly 4GB of RAM or does it have to be a tiny bit less, like 4090-4095MB?

Thanks,

[Crash2009]

So with this build it seems to work OK for while... then suddenly, on some recorded shows, it will play just fine for a few minutes and then the screen goes to a solid color (red, green, blue, orange), but you can still hear the audio. It doesn't happen right away so I figured perhaps she had a bad tuner. To test that I used the guide to pick a channel, watch it for a second, set it to record so the tuner would stay on it, then used the guide to check another channel.. rinse repeat until I hit a tuner conflict... Sooo after doing that each tuner appeared fine which disappointed me. I figured that perhaps it has to record for a while before it acts up... so I let them record an hour and nothing... all the recordings were fine.

My opinion on your problem is......

I have never had much success with shotgun troubleshooting. MSI is a pain to support. The MB is 6 years old. The tuners are from 2009 and likely DELL proprietary. God only knows about the rest of the parts. It was nice of you to throw something together for her.... but.... Toss that POS in the trash can and build her a new box.

Its Mothers Day in 3 weeks.

Have a look over at the Silicon Dust (SD) website and get the correct NETWORK tuner for her situation. Plug the tuner into the network, and all your mothers stuff will be watching TV.

[Scallica]

I agree. MSI is garbage. Burn it with fire.

Take a look at the Intel NUC. Plop in a 2.5" SSD and HDD for recorded shows. Then pickup a network-based SiliconDust tuner. You'll have a nice compact HTPC.

[audinutt]

3rd msi sucks. Plus I am no longer amd fan boy. Go Intel.

Sent from my SM-N900V using Tapatalk

[STC]

*gently pats home office MSI PC that is five years old*

I've been lucky with this one, please don't jinx it.

[DavidinCT]

I agree. MSI is garbage. Burn it with fire.

Take a look at the Intel NUC. Plop in a 2.5" SSD and HDD for recorded shows. Then pickup a network-based SiliconDust tuner. You'll have a nice compact HTPC.

Agreed, I was always a ASUS board user so when it was time to rebuilt my PCs (HTPC and gaming PC), I said, let's give MSI a shot. Nothing but problems, My $350 Mpower X99a gaming board has been giving me problem by problem. Then it would not post, sent it back to them, no advanced exchange and now 3 weeks later, I am still waiting for my board to return... Even on my HTPC, I had a Bios update problem and the computer would not even boot, I had to deal with manual dos commands to MANUALLY update the bios to get it working again. I will NEVER buy a MSI motherboard again after this experiance. I had a problem once with my past ASUS boards, Advanced exchange, sent me a new board, droppped old in in box, sent back, was up and running in under 48 hours.

Hmmm.... new video card, same problem (I was leaning towards a video card for that issue). By chance, have you tried to take a recording with the issue and transfer it to another PC to see if the problem is there ? If the problem is there, then no question, tuner cards.... I had a old PVR500 (dual analog), with 4gb it didn't work right, 3gb it did...I still have it sitting here, in my collection of old tuners with my QAM tuners that I cant use due to comcast going all digital.

I have seen colored video like that with a flakey video card, a quick swap solved it.