Reduced bandwidth on a SkystarS2 card?

[Cian]

Hi,

 

My current system has two cards: a SkystarS2 and a Terratec Cinergy S2 PCI. My Cinergy was unreliable for a while (partial recordings), so I made the SkystarS2 my preferred card. On occasion, the S2 card would get "confused" (scrambled data even on SD channels) and require system reset, so I decided to try and solve both these issues by upgrading both drivers.

 

Now the Skystar is stuttering on high bit-rate channels (above 10M). In Transedit, I am seeing no dropped packets so it is not a cable issue. It is not a "live" decoding/rendering issue because the Terratec has no problems with the same channels and the stuttering is on the playback of recordings mad on the Skystar. Likewise, if I stream the channel to the local PC it is stuttering on that too. Using DVBViewer on a different PC on the house network stutters too. In all these cases, the Terratec card has no problems.

 

This all leads me to think that the internal "network" part of the Skystar has somehow become limited. I have rolled back the drivers but this has made no difference. I have since put back the up-to-date drivers.

 

I am using DVBViewer 5.1 and RS 1.26. I have not rolled back the software versions.

 

Is there an adjustment for the internal bandwidth of the card, or am I barking up the wrong tree. Is the card on the way out?

 

If anyone has any info I would be grateful.

 

Thanks,

 

C.

 

EDIT. Just rolled back to RS1.25 and problem is solved.

support.zip

Edited May 19, 2013 by Cian

[Griga]

The SkyStar S2 is limited to approx. 40 MBit/s maximum PCI data rate (maybe a bit more). So several DVB-S2 transponders that are broadcasting with a higher rate will let the SkyStar2 lose data if it is configured for "Open whole transponder" mode in the hardware settings. In practice the card is only usable with hardware PID filtering, which means, streams that are not requested by the application are filtered out before they pass through the PCI bus.

 

Since the TransEdit Analyzer forces "whole transponder" mode, you will see missing packets there if the transponder's data rate gets too high. Another measure to reduce the data rate is the Null Packet Filter that can be configured in the TransEdit Hardware settings. It filters the mostly useless null packets (PID 0x1FFF) out. However, the TransEdit Analyzer can not measure the true transponder data rate anymore if the null packets are missing. Whether the Null Packet Filter reduces the data rate sufficiently or not depends on the transponder. AFAIK DVBViewer always uses null packet filtering.

 

However, receiving a single HD channel (or even two HD channels at the same time) in "whole transponder off" mode should not cause any bandwidth issues.

[Tjod]

If there is a crash the SkyStar 2 can get in a bad state. Which can cause such problems.

To fix that you have to disable and enable the card in the device manager. Or remove the power from the PC. A shut-down is not enough.

[Cian]

Hi,

 

Thanks for the replies.

 

I had read about the bandwidth issues on the "Whole Transponder" front and had that disabled already. It was this that made me wonder of there was some form of internal limiting on the device in a setting somewhere.

 

On the TransEdit front, I was not seeing any packet loss there which again made me think of internal limiting of the card.

 

When the card crashes, I have found that a restart of the PC has been enough, but maybe I have not experienced a real crash yet!

 

As I said, rolling back to Recording Service 1.25 seems to have solved the issue. It may be worth looking at if other users have issues. In any case, I am happy enough to stay with 1.25 for the moment.

 

Thanks again,

 

C.