Hauppauge PVR 150/250 Not Coexisting

[Taddeusz]

I recently had a hard drive failure on my HTPC and I've now got it back up and running but I'm having problems with the two tuner cards that I didn't have before. I know there has been lots of discussion previously but I must not be searching for the right terms.

My problem is that when I have both drivers installed it appears that the PVR 250 stops working and all I get is the "#2" capture card in SageTV. Which is the PVR 150. I attempted a clean install of XP twice. The second time I installed the 250 first and the 150 second. It sort of worked that time. The 250 worked and I configured the 150 but it was giving me a -12 error trying to configure the picture settings. Then I rebooted and it did the same thing all over again. The 150 "#2" capture device is working and the 250 doesn't show in SageTV.

The only thing that I can think is that it is a weird driver conflict between the two cards. It appears that the 250 driver hasn't been updated since 2004 but the 150 driver was updated earlier this year. I'm not sure what I can do to get the #1 card back up and running. It's kind of weird.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Taddeusz]

I didn't get any replies but I got it solved. I remembered the CD that came with my PVR 150 had drivers for the 150, 250, and 350. Version 2.2A I believe. I simply installed that driver for both cards and that got both cards working at the same time. IMHO, Hauppauge has the best tuner cards out there but it looks like their driver updates are falling behind since I can't get the same latest driver for both cards. I can't imagine there is too much difference between the two cards.

[Taddeusz]

Ok, this is totally screwed up. Apparently my computer rebooted over the weekend because it did some updates. After it rebooted SageTV no longer sees either card. This is really getting tiring trying to figuer out what is flipping wrong with these two cards that used to work perfectly fine together before my hard drive went south and I had to reinstall XP. This is just stupid. I love Hauppauge cards but this is just totally nuts.

[Opus4]

I don't know how often this might occur any more, but try checking the sage.properties file to make sure the tuners aren't listed on the mmc/ignore_encoders line.

- Andy

[Taddeusz]

No, those cards aren't on the ignore list.

Well, I got it working again. The ONLY thing different about how the computer was is that I enabled the onboard SATA controller for the new drive. After a bit of poking around I noticed one of the tuners was on the same IRQ as the SATA controller. I also noticed the other card was on the same IRQ as the video card. Technically this shouldn't be a problem but after rebooting and redetecting the cards it started working again. I even rebooted once more and it's still working. I also took the liberty of disabling the totally automatic updates since SageTV is all I use that computer for.

The other problem I noticed after getting things back up and running, and I know this topic has been flogged to death but I thought was actually dead, is that the video playback looks a bit jittery at times. Not so bad that it's unwatcheable but can be kind of annoying. It seems to come and go. Mostly after I've fast forwarded through commercials. Kind of a bit odd.

[gplasky]

Is the video jittery when it is accessing the SATA drive? Side effect of it being on the same IRQ probably.

Gerry

[Taddeusz]

It's on a different IRQ now and it still is jittery. When I start playing a recorded show it's fine. It starts after the first time I fastforward through the commercials.

I use Cyberlink's decoder. I've had a difficult time previously with nVidia's decoder and much preffered the quality of Cyberlink's output once I did.

What really bugs me still is that it was all working before. The only difference is the SATA controller and two fewer hard drives.

Another weird thing I noticed and managed to fix the other night is that the default setting to sleep to the screensaver doesn't work correctly with the Hauppauge remote commands. I ended up switching it back to sleep to the tray so that I wouldn't have to hit "power" multiple times to get the controls to work. It made using my Harmony remote a pain in the butt till I figured out what was going on.