350 TVout garbled w/ 250 installed

[DaveT]

Hi guys - I couldn't find anybody else with this strange one yet..

I built my Sage box with 2.0, a PVR-350 using the TVout on it, and a PVR-250 as the second tuner. It was working perfectly for about 3 days, then I had some error causing me to reboot it. When it came back up, all I could get on the TV is a B/W very scrambled signal (i.e. the horiz sync is way off). Taking the 250 out restored the picture. I tried putting it back in with the same bad effect.

I've used both the beta drivers suggested in the "IVAC15/16" thread, and even tried upgrading to the latest official Hauppauge driver without any luck.

Any suggestions?

-Dave
AMD Athalon XP 2800+; 512M RAM; 250G SATA drive; Hauppage PVR-350; PVR-250

[carlgar]

Your picture sounds a lot like my 350 did when the tuner in it went bad. You might want to try the bad 250 in the computer without the 350. Also try using the WinTV2000 software, to see if it gives the same results. If it does, you probably should contact who you bought the card from about warranty info.

[carlgar]

Just for clarication, are all shows garbled? I would expect only shows recorded with the 250 to be garbled the shows recorded recorded with the 350 should play properly.

[DaveT]

Thanks for the quick reply!

I guess I mis-stated my problem. ALL video output of the 350 is garbled - including the main menu. Perhaps "garbled" isn't quite right..

When the PC first boots up, I get the white screen on the TV, then it will blink out (black), get a slight sync flicker and then the menu pops up. With the 250 installed now I still get the white screen, black screen, then a out-of-sync B/W screen when the main menu is displaying.

I did re-build the machine (had started off trying to play with XP MCE but ended up re-formatting w/ XP Pro. Basically a similar thing happened with both OSes - but the XP pro had run perfectly for 3 days.

It looks to me that it might be a driver issue, but haven't seen any other posts like this.

[carlgar]

This does not sound like a mixed card issue at all. See the Mixed Hauppauge Card bug - Example thread for a picture of what I would expect.

You should also go to the

SHS site under the PRV Model and make sure of what type of 250 you have. The term 250 seems to refer to serveral different types of cards now.

Have you tried software decoding to see if it is garbled also?

[DaveT]

The screen definitely doesnt look like your mixed hauppauge card bug picture. I'll take a picture of the screen and post it tonight when I get home.

Pretty interesting site - I'll have to explore that one too. It is a brand new boxed PVR-250 like the "revision 3 Conexant CX23416 chip" indicated on that page.

I have not tried software decoding (I take it you mean to disable the hardware decoding only). I'll try that tonight too. At least I can still get to the PC via DameWare when its not able to display on the TV.

[DaveT]

ok - this is very curious. And perhaps somewhat self-correcting. I've included a picture of what the main menu screen looks like after putting the 250 back in.

Then I started experimenting and plugged the IR pigtail from the 350 to the 250, and managed to open up a recording, which to my suprise played perfectly! After that the main menu came up and looked fine.

Has anyone ever seen a screen like this?

[DaveT]

now everytime I reboot my Sage box, the screen shown in the previous post is displayed until I watch any program, then it displays fine.

Anybody have any suggestions at all?

[jphhughes]

I can confirm that I have had that exact same screen (problem).As you say it does go away when you do LieTV though. It seems to have gone away and I am not sure what fixed it. I have had so many problems my head is spinning. It seemed to me (going on menory) that when I deleted all of the encoder lines in the porperties file (as suggested by some here ) and re-installed the capture cards that problem went away.

If you want to try this make sure you save a copy of your current properties file in another directory so you can restore it. ALso any changes to the properties file requires that you close SageTV(not just sleeping).