PVR-150MCE tuner quality is poor the first couple seconds

[zubblwump]

I'm sure my terminology is wrong here, but after finally getting my PVR-150MCE to work with my PVR-250MCE, I noticed a peculiar situation with the PVR-150 (hooked to coax from the wall).

It appears thath the tuner has to "auto-tune" each station for a couple seconds before getting a good picture. When I change channels, the picture is horrible, as if I was trying to tune an out-of-range antenna brodcast. After a couple of seconds the picture works itself out and appears clear as normal. I find it odd because my old "freestyle" card hooked to the exact same cable from the wall did not do this. It was clear from the start.

Is this something common with the 150 series? Is there a setting somewhere I need to tweak? Or is this something odd unique to this particular card?

[zubblwump]

It's been quite a while with no response, so I thought I'd give this one final try.

I'm still getting this strange problem, sometimes it lasts up to 7-10 minutes before it clears up. It now appears to be a rainbow effect as well as "snowy".

I can't figure out why it's doing this or if there's any thing I can do to fix it.

I'll try to attach some pictures/video later tonight.

[zubblwump]

Well, I've found something probably very important that I'd not noticed before. THis only seems to happen on one channel, the local ABC affiliate. Is there anything I can do to improve the initial tuning performance of this channel on this capture card?

[zubblwump]

In case my poor description of the issue has left everyone confused, here's a short clip that should clear up any confusion:

[ke6guj]

It sucks to be talking to yourself. IT's probably a WAG, but I wonder about the signal quality coming from the coax. Is the PVR-250 also using straight coax from the wall, or an STB? Have you tried swapping inputs or improving signal strength via removing splitters or installing an amp.

[marneb17]

I see the same thing with my pvr150 card, but I only notice it very seldomly because of padding I have with pretty much every show.

Marneb

[IncredibleHat]

I started to get this behavior when I bought a second PVR150mce to go with my other PVR150mce (which NEVER had this problem).

Now both cards do it, and it seems to be on CBS, and sometimes Cinemax or Showtime. I've seen it also on one other 'lower numbered' channel some local thing like pbs, but not pbs.

Anyhow, I have been in contact with hauppauge support about it, and they couldn't come up with any ideas. They finnally just said "we'll give you and RMA number and you can send it in and we can test it". Since this problem didn't start until I got the second card in, I thought it may be some bad stuff from the second card. As pulling the second card, the first card acts normal again. However pulling the first card, the second card STILL does the rainbow effect on tuning those few channels.

The worst part is... I can live with the rainbox effect the first 10 seconds of a show... but randomly it completely DROPS SOUND. The only way I am able to get sound back, is to catch the channel BEFORE it starts to record, and unhook the first card, sound comes back, then plug the first card back into the wall.

This is all COAX cable from the wall.

I had REWIRED the entire house with new thicker, and quad shielded cable (it used to have about a mile of cheapy 20 year old singe shielded 22AWG CRAP wire). Well, the rewiring eliminated some odd badning interferance on 'all' channels, and cleaned up a few others of static. However it did nothing to help the PVR150 problem.

SO...

To talk technical stuff. The first card of mine, is like 11 months old now, and uses a Samsung tuner chip. The second newer card I bought last month, uses a ESMT tuner chip, and is of a new rev.

This is a screenshot of the two cards:

http://swankyplace.com/forumimgs/hauppaugecards.jpg