My searches don't show this issue having come up, although I may have missed
it...

On many of my recordings (multiple times during long recordings, like
baseball games) the playback will just freeze. It's like it's on pause. But
pressing play does not get it moving. I have to skip or fast forward to get
past the problem. It's definitely "in" the recording: If I rewind back before
the problem and try playing again, it freezes in the same spot. Also, this
happens during playback on my MCE PC, as well as my MCX, so I don't believe
it has anything to do with my video card, etc.

I don't remember having this problem, or at least near as frequently, until
I added an external firewire drive that I'm using for all recordings. The
freezes happen in the middle of recordings, so it doesn't have anything to do
with the drive turning it self off (which it does to save power after some
amount of inactivity). I guess the drive could be bad, but I haven't found
any problems on the drive, although I'm not quite sure what I should look for.

Obviously a solution would be to stop using the new drive, but I like the
new drive. My family needs 300GBs ;-)

Thanks in advance for any clues.

It apppears that the external drive had trouble keeping up with the
recording and some frame and frame update data was dropped causing either
the decoder or stop since the time stamps of the data were not correct.
You might be able to play a recording with Media Player instead of MCE but I
suspect that the same problem will happen.
Look in your event logs for drive write errors. Also insure that your
firewire card is not sharing an IRQ with any other device being used at the
time the recordings are being made.

"Hal" <Hal@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:301D2319-3100-438F-90BB-748ACD1F78B7@microsoft.com...
> My searches don't show this issue having come up, although I may have
> missed
> it...
>
> On many of my recordings (multiple times during long recordings, like
> baseball games) the playback will just freeze. It's like it's on pause.
> But
> pressing play does not get it moving. I have to skip or fast forward to
> get
> past the problem. It's definitely "in" the recording: If I rewind back
> before
> the problem and try playing again, it freezes in the same spot. Also, this
> happens during playback on my MCE PC, as well as my MCX, so I don't
> believe
> it has anything to do with my video card, etc.
>
> I don't remember having this problem, or at least near as frequently,
> until
> I added an external firewire drive that I'm using for all recordings. The
> freezes happen in the middle of recordings, so it doesn't have anything to
> do
> with the drive turning it self off (which it does to save power after some
> amount of inactivity). I guess the drive could be bad, but I haven't found
> any problems on the drive, although I'm not quite sure what I should look
> for.
>
> Obviously a solution would be to stop using the new drive, but I like the
> new drive. My family needs 300GBs ;-)
>
> Thanks in advance for any clues.

Thanks JW... It didn't occur to me that the drive might be able to keep up
(doh!) I did find warnings in the Media Center event log that seemed to be
more common after I started using the external drive, but it didn't seem to
me to be conclusive.

However I did discover that write caching was turned off on the external
drive. I've enabled it and I'll see if the errors continue.

Thanks again!

-- Hal
"JW" wrote:

> It apppears that the external drive had trouble keeping up with the
> recording and some frame and frame update data was dropped causing either
> the decoder or stop since the time stamps of the data were not correct.
> You might be able to play a recording with Media Player instead of MCE but I
> suspect that the same problem will happen.
> Look in your event logs for drive write errors. Also insure that your
> firewire card is not sharing an IRQ with any other device being used at the
> time the recordings are being made.
>
> "Hal" <Hal@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
> news:301D2319-3100-438F-90BB-748ACD1F78B7@microsoft.com...
> > My searches don't show this issue having come up, although I may have
> > missed
> > it...
> >
> > On many of my recordings (multiple times during long recordings, like
> > baseball games) the playback will just freeze. It's like it's on pause.
> > But
> > pressing play does not get it moving. I have to skip or fast forward to
> > get
> > past the problem. It's definitely "in" the recording: If I rewind back
> > before
> > the problem and try playing again, it freezes in the same spot. Also, this
> > happens during playback on my MCE PC, as well as my MCX, so I don't
> > believe
> > it has anything to do with my video card, etc.
> >
> > I don't remember having this problem, or at least near as frequently,
> > until
> > I added an external firewire drive that I'm using for all recordings. The
> > freezes happen in the middle of recordings, so it doesn't have anything to
> > do
> > with the drive turning it self off (which it does to save power after some
> > amount of inactivity). I guess the drive could be bad, but I haven't found
> > any problems on the drive, although I'm not quite sure what I should look
> > for.
> >
> > Obviously a solution would be to stop using the new drive, but I like the
> > new drive. My family needs 300GBs ;-)
> >
> > Thanks in advance for any clues.
>
>
>