Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1800 Jerky unless recording

[michaeldg1]

My WinTV seems to work fine for recording with no problems, BUT...

It won't play normal when I just want to watch TV.

In other words, I can watch TV just fine if I am recording it, and the recordings are fine. But if I am not recording it will play fine for one or two seconds, then the audio goes silent, then a few seconds later the video will start to be jerky.

I have googled and read until my eyes are falling out. I have searched this forum without illumination. The hardware must be fine, since it works perfectly if I am recording.

I've installed the latest drivers.

Let me know what I need to tell you about my system and I'll post it here.
I have a 2.8 gigahertz AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core processor
An ASUSTeK M2N-E board
2048 Megabytes Installed Memory
A Radeon X1650 Series video card

I'm pulling out my hair -- and that is serious because I don't have much left anyway.

Thank you for your help!

[jagabo]

I would try updating your graphics and audio drivers if you haven't done so already.

[Bjs]

Welcome michaeldg1

Confirm it is the "AMD Athlon 64 X2 5400 Brisbane 2.8GHz Dual-Core" or not ?

When you say "play" ... Play in what media player ?

[jagabo]

I don't know about the HVR-1800 in particular but some other Hauppauge cards use different mechanismsto preview video and record it. When recording the computer receives an already compressed MPG stream from the card, saves it to a file, and decompresses it for display. When previewing the computer recieves a raw YUV video and PCM audio stream from the card and uses the graphic's cards video overlay feature to display it. The fact that you can capture video but not preview implies there is something wrong with the latter mechanism. Maybe an incompatible colorspace converter. Or a graphics or audio driver issue.

[DarrellS]

The weirdest thing happened to me last year while recording a football game with the HVR1800. The game was almost over so I went to get ready to stop the capture and it was playing the first quarter in slow mo. I was bummed out cause I knew the capture was messed up but to my surprise, the capture was perfect. Don't know what caused it to play funky in the TV program.