Help with Getting Picture?

[flyerman]

I have been using these programs for a while and update frequently. Now I can't get a picture from any input. I have the Provideo card and when trying to use Sage recorder with the preview I get a black boxs with no picture. I am trying s-video, composite and cable input. I tried reinstalling about 30 times with support and without support for the Provideo card. I tried downloading the new drivers for this card and still have the old ones. Is there certain drivers that work with this card?

Any help would be appreciated.

The last driver for the Provideo card I have installed is 14.
I am using beta version V1.2.5 beta.

[Narflex]

First, upgrade to V1.2.8 for Sage. Then check to make sure all of your connections are plugged in. :)

What happens if you do a record instead of just preview? On the tuner, do you get static or just black? Do you get any audio?

[flyerman]

Jeff, Where can I pick up the latest beta? Thanks Bob
Sorry got them. I found the problem to be with the video drivers with my radeon 7500.

[salsbst]

flyerman, if you don't mind, what versions of the Radeon drivers did and didn't work for you? Were/are you using VMR or overlay?

I think I may be suffering from a similar problem (although mine is with SageTV not SageRecorder). It seems like putting SageTV to sleep will not fix the problem, but exiting it and relaunching does fix the problem (temporarily).

The one reason, in my case, that I might doubt that the Radeon is the problem is that putting SageTV to sleep is not doing whatever reset is necessary to get the picture back: somewhere I believe I read from Narflex that as SageTV goes to sleep it releases all of its rendering resources. But if it really has, then I think that any overlay problems that were correctable by clicking buttons in SageTV would be corrected by sleeping it.

Is there something on the rendering side that is only released/reset by completely exiting SageTV?

Sadly, I haven't yet tested whether or not recordings are made successfully when the screen goes black. Obviously this is an important point as black screens seem also to come from encoder and/or decoder problems as well as rendering problems.

I'm thinking of trying the following tonight:


see if it is recording successfully when the screen goes black (it tends to happen as I change channels (SageTV->Girder->cable box)
switch to overlay
some other set of ATI drivers


Does anybody have any advice on this/other course(s) of action?

Thanks,
Stuart

[salsbst]

Well, I upgraded to the 3.4 drivers (latest) from ATI. I also switched over to Elecard/DScaler decoding. It seems like I'm seeing two results:

a) SageTV can go to sleep much faster (or maybe myHTPC's screen is redrawn faster.. hard to tell which is which)
b) I'm seeing less frequent picture freezes, but they aren't completely gone.

Yesterday I saw a freeze on a recorded program. When I got it unstuck (quit SageTV and relaunch it) I tried again and no freeze. So, it's something in the decoding/rendering process. It seems to occur when the screen legitimately goes black (on a cable-box channel change).

I've just ordered a Radeon 9600 (non pro) (in part b/c of this, in part because the 7500's GPU fan is now the loudest one in my box, and in part because I know it will be much better with VMR). We'll see how much impact that has (in a week and a half... the free shipping from ATI is pretty slow).

Regards,
Stuart

[mlbdude]

Have you ever seen this problem outside of Sage? What Hauppauge 250 drivers are you using?

Have you tried to duplicate the problem with myHTPC closed? I know myHTPC also grabs the overlay with its media player (not sure if that would conflict with VMR thougn).

[salsbst]

Thanks for the ideas, mlbdude!

No, I haven't seen this problem outside of Sage, but this is a new system and I have yet to even watch a complete DVD on it (although I have tested that it can at least begin to play a DVD).

Hauppauge drivers should be the ones from SHS' "CD download" v1.7.21143. However, they report themselves as some earlier version (can't remember which), so I'm not positive. I think I recall, though, that the version number was mistakenly not incremented.

I'm not using the myHTPC Media Player, so it's probably not grabbing the overlay, and as you point out, this probably wouldn't affect VMR.

I'd try WinTV PVR but I have a problem there: the only way I can control it (unless I program Girder for it) is through VNC (no mouse/keyboard/monitor on the machine). But VNC and WinTV PVR do not get along with each other at all.

Is there something else I can test?

Thanks,
Stuart

[mlbdude]

Have you tried any of the drivers from Hauppauges site yet? I am using the beta drivers from their site and have used the production drivers from them.

Was there a reason you needed to use SHS's betas? Did you upgrade to those drivers from the ones on the CD or did you go straight to them? I noticed that unless I ran the HWCLEAR utility Device Manager would always report the previous driver.

I used to use a AIW 7500 and it worked fine. It died so I upgraded to a Radeon 9000 and it is also running fine with the latest drivers.

Good luck :)

[salsbst]

I started with the ones on CD: I had audio chirping.

Then the latest from Hauppauge's site. This, IIRC, is when I started to have the video freeze problems. But it may just have been the first time that I noticed it. The audio chirping was pretty unbearable so I may not have gotten past that with the CD's drivers.

Then the latest from SHS (after going through his steps to remove previous, including the HWCLEAR utility). These newest drivers didn't seem to fix anything for me, nor did they seem to break anything, either.

Thanks for ideas and well-wishing!