Unreliable R5000 tuning

[GKusnick]

After six months of stable operation, my R5000 unit has started occasionally mistuning some channels. For instance on Sunday night I got an hour of QVC instead of Battlestar Galactica. Other channels, such as TNT, it sometimes refuses to tune at all, and just gives me an ever-escalating failed transfer count instead of a proper signal. Power-cycling the STB generally puts things right again -- for a while, anyway.

Has anybody else seen anything like this, or have any suggestions for fixing it? I'll take it up with Nextcom support if necessary, but I thought I'd check here first. The STB is a Hughes E86 DirecTV receiver. I'm using version 2.4f of the R5000 software with SageTV 6.1.4.

On a related note, should I be able to hook the R5000 STB's component out directly to my TV and get a viewable image, like an unmodified STB? I tried that while troubleshooting and got nothing. Or does the R5000 mod disable the STB's video outputs?

Thanks.

[NEOSG]

Haven't had outright bad channel changes before.

My video outputs do work on my STB

[camTexas]

I also have my units component outputs hooked up to my TV directly with no issues... that's the only way I've watched my H.264 channels for well over a year (painfull).

A long time ago I had a few instances where the R5000 would tune to the wrong channel. I always power cycled the Vip211 and it would work fine for several weeks before flaking out again. I've been running the beta software for several months now and haven't had any noticible issues.

[GKusnick]

Well, it looks like I solved my problem by shifting the R5000 to a different USB jack on my PC. Not sure if the old jack was bad, or whether it was the resulting driver reinstall that did the trick, but in any case I haven't seen a tuning failure since I made the change a few days ago (whereas before it was about 50/50 whether any given tuning attempt would succeed).