Problems recording in Media center

[tykkimies]

Hi. I have a hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1800 tv tuner. I never had any problems with this while i was using windows 7, but now I am using windows 8.1 and am having tons of trouble getting my tuner setup with media center. I have been able to get it to where the live tv works perfectly. But when i start to record a program, it looks like it is going to work for the first few seconds, then it skips a little, and then it freezes all together forcing me to close media center from the task manager. Thats not the worst part of it either. After the freeze from attempting to record, it virtually breaks media center until i restart my pc. if i try to go back to just live tv all i get is the spinning wheel.

I have attempted several times to re-install media center by removing feature, and then adding again.

After about three attempts at that i started everything from scratch by removing all of my hauppauge drivers and applications, media center, and then also removing registry keys that were not removed with the remove media center feature(this was suggested to someone with a similar issue on another forum), and then re installing all of that. i restarted in between each step too. All of my graphics drivers are up to date. This was on a clean install of windows 8 that this is happening on also.

I have just about expended all of my knowledge with media center and am now asking if anyone on here can help me out. Anyone got any suggestions on why my recordings break everything?

My setup:
FIOS STB into my tuner. Hauppauge HVR 1800, or 1850. (I forget which, but they use the same drivers.)
core i5 - haswell
geforce gtx 760

[Scallica]

Have you tried recording to a different hard drive?

[tykkimies]

You sir have saved me a lot of troubles. I was trying to record to my external hard drive which is connected through usb and i guess it doesn't like that. Although i would prefer to use that drive so i can save some space on my sata drives i guess it will have to do. I still find it odd that once a recording got attempted once that it would require me to reinstall media center to even be able to set it up again. But for now it is working, and was able to record an entire episode which was never acheived before so i am happy. Thank you Scallica

[adam1991]

Just to clarify something here, you said:

" I never had any problems with this while i was using windows 7, but now I am using windows 8.1 and am having tons of trouble getting my tuner setup with media center. I have been able to get it to where the live tv works perfectly. But when i start to record a program, it looks like it is going to work for the first few seconds, then it skips a little, and then it freezes all together forcing me to close media center from the task manager."

So you said your only change was moving to Win 8.1, but you also made another change--that is, you changed from recording to the internal drive on Win7 over to recording to an external drive on Win8?

I mention this only to hammer home, always consider and/or tell everything that changed no matter how insignificant you may think it is. I can't tell you how many people I've spoken with who will swear up and down for 15 minutes how nothing's changed, only to grill them like a war prisoner and discover that yes, something changed--sometimes dramatically.

True story: after a customer swore up and down that nothing changed, I discovered a half an hour later that they moved his desk from one side of the office to the other the previous evening. And guess what? His network cable didn't get plugged in.

But nothing changed...

Some of my days are nothing but asking, "is it plugged in and turned on?" You'd be amazed at how many "issues" that simple question resolves in the world. Not just the computer/tech world, but overall.

[tykkimies]

I actually didn't change drives. I used the external drive when I was using windows 7. So windows 8 is the only upgrade. That's why I never thought of changing the drive because it had always worked before. Not sure if maybe the drive is failing now?

[Scallica]

Not sure if maybe the drive is failing now?

Install HD Sentinel to check your drive's health--> http://www.hdsentinel.com/download.php

[adam1991]

I actually didn't change drives. I used the external drive when I was using windows 7. So windows 8 is the only upgrade. That's why I never thought of changing the drive because it had always worked before. Not sure if maybe the drive is failing now?

huh. Yeah, check for that. Absent a failing hard drive, I would research to see if Win8 handles external drives *any* differently than Win7. I know there's an issue that WMC won't record to network drives; I wonder if Win8 deals more strongly with USB connected drives, in terms of "this is not strictly speaking a local drive"--something like that could impact WMC.

[JohnW248]

I have a 4TB USB 3.0 drive on a Win8.1 machine and the drive "sleeps" and it takes MC a minute or more to "wake up the drive". I don't record much on the Win8.1 machine since it's really just an experimental environment but you might want to check through your power settings.

[adam1991]

Agreed. USB is a funny thing. It can cause all sorts of non-obvious things.