Reached my last staw, Sage tv is unreliable ...!

[danward79]

Guy's this is starting to get a bit picky, lets chill are take a step back, I posted a comment last night, and read again this morning and to me it all seems rather bitchy.

Right, I have now got that out of my system....

The Issue with dual tuner cards seems to be only with a Version 15 350, and a version 16 250, when used together. There does not appear to be a problem from what i have noted around the forums with running 2 250's of mixed versions.

It has been a couple of months since i got my pair working, but I took these steps:-

- Kept my HTPC open till I got it running sweetly!
- Download various drivers from both Hauppauge and SHS, I am currently using shs 21176
- I ended up with my 350 in PCI slot 1 and my 250 in PCI slot 3
- Auto install the drivers for the first card (250), then manually install the drivers for the second card and select which driver to use choice hauppauge wintv encoder/decoder
- as Carlgar said if you have one card with poor output quality, fiddle around with the Brightness contrast and saturation, etc.
- I beleive the sharpness setting is a major player in the quality (macroblocking) problems from the card, set it to "0"

I think that is all I did to get the card running together, It took a little while, some patence, curiousness, experimentation. I also looked on the forum alot and found a post, which told me how to sort out the driver issue, can't find it now.

Just remembered when i install any hauppauge drivers I completely uninstall them and clear all registry entries etc, with the utils they provide, HWclear or whatever it is called.

I hope this helps,

Dan

[SHS]

Attn: carlgar I'm not sure if try this but give a shot.
How do good uninstall with older drv and app.
In this kit I add a new file called hcw_unregister.bat.
1: Run hcw_unregister.bat.
2: Uninstall everything from Add/Remove Progams with the words Hauppauge and InterVideo FilterSDK.
3: Run hcwclear.exe.
4: Reboot.
5: DO NOT cancel hardware wizard un-check all Option Search location so that it dosen't fine anything, re-run hcwclear.exe one more time dbl check everything over.
6: Check the registry by searching for the words hcw, wintv, globespan and hauppauge "Note: DON NOT REMOVE the registry key hcw4.0".
7: Check the Device Mangaer for (?) if you see one rigth click uninstall it.
8: Power down and take out the PVR 350.
9: Install 250 drivers only
10 Power down
11 Put 350 backin power up Install 350 drivers
12: Run setup install WinTV2000. MPEG decoder, IR32

Download this CD kit
Click here download 1.7.21288 CD Install
Used this INF I attach to this message just over wirte the INF from that zip

[pawn]

Since you are among the very few (if not the only one) who has a v15 + v16 combination working fine, I would appreciate if you could post some details of your hardware configuration, including driver details. That may help isolate the issue.


Windows XP Home, SP1
Pentium IV 1.8GHz, 528 MB DDR
Asus P4PE Motherboard
Radeon 9100
Using built in SoundMaxx on motherboard

SageTV v 1.4.10, including client
1 - v15 PVR-250, 1 - v16 PVR-250, both on server
Driver Version: 1.17.110.21062
Using Hauppage Filters
Using 2.0 GB/hr (Great) capture quality
Using "Leave (2GB) Free" disk space option

[insomniac]

are you using "Use X Space"? If so, do you have X amount of space available for Sage?

I have ran into this problem several times in the past. Due to whatever issues, I have had to reinstall several times. Ive found that sage does not import the recordings in the "sage" folder back into its "sage recordings" list. Therefore it does not allocate that used space towards its tally of total space. From farsight, I would say a bad bit of code. This could be easily fixed doing a relatively simple disk space query on every startup of sage or in timed intervals(not picking on you Jeff ). Programmers choice...

Anyway..cant tell you if there is an easier fix. I just usually go delete all the old recordings or move them to my library if I really care.

I.

[carlgar]

Originally posted by SHS
Attn: carlgar I'm not sure if try this but give a shot.
How do good uninstall with older drv and app.
In this kit I add a new file called hcw_unregister.bat.
1: Run hcw_unregister.bat.
2: Uninstall everything from Add/Remove Progams with the words Hauppauge and InterVideo FilterSDK.
3: Run hcwclear.exe.
4: Reboot.
5: DO NOT cancel hardware wizard un-check all Option Search location so that it dosen't fine anything, re-run hcwclear.exe one more time dbl check everything over.
6: Check the registry by searching for the words hcw, wintv, globespan and hauppauge "Note: DON NOT REMOVE the registry key hcw4.0".
7: Check the Device Mangaer for (?) if you see one rigth click uninstall it.
8: Power down and take out the PVR 350.
9: Install 250 drivers only
10 Power down
11 Put 350 backin power up Install 350 drivers
12: Run setup install WinTV2000. MPEG decoder, IR32

Download this CD kit
Click here download 1.7.21288 CD Install
Used this INF I attach to this message just over wirte the INF from that zip

I just tried the above without see any improvement. I encountered some new problems during the install so the results may not be reliable.
When I got go step 12, I selected only the three applications you listed . I normally also include the Scheduler and Radio. However, this time during the install I got the following system error:
Hauppauge SMD(03) Install 4.0.21154 has encountered a problem and needs to close.

I did report the problem to microsoft. The above may be the end of reliable information. But I continued to see what would happen.
I then started WinTV2000 and started the searching for channels. During this process another system error occured and the system rebooted. I screen with the error messages flashed too quickly for me to see them.
When the system came back up, I also reported this system error to Microsoft, which replied with the page indicating that it was a driver problem.

I tried WinTV2000 again to see if the channels were set, they were not. I then started SageTV to see if the drivers made any difference. They did not the 250 cards still came up in a bad recording mode. I then exited SageTV and disabled the 350 card. When I restarted the 250 cards still came up in a bad recording mode. I finally shutdown the system and removed the 350 card again. When I came back up SageTV came back up with perfect recording on the 250 cards.

At this point I am running with only the 250 cards with the 21288 drivers. They installed with a date of 9/29/2003 and version 1.17.390.21272. If you see and unexpected problems I will return to my base drivers which I obtained from your site.

[EncoderHouse]

Wow, I just spent a ½ hour reading and analyzing this thread, I am amazed at the attitudes that have been posted. What a shame. I am not going to get into detail, regarding your issues. I want to let you know that I am one of those power users. I have been running sage for over a year, and I am very happy with it.



Carlgari I do not have the issues you are facing! I keep the 350’s on the clients and the 250 in the server.
Disk space is not a problem; I have some disks that are 64K and others that are default setting.

The SageTV software is not your problem. This is a true hardware issue; keep in mind that Frey is working hard to roll out V2. Your issues are valid, and I hope that V2 will help resolve your issues.

[Narflex]

I've done every combination of 250/350, 15/16 cards in my workstation and they've always worked flawlessly. I've also seen other PCs that simply would not work with more than one capture card in them (but work fine with multiple USB devices, combined with a PCI card). In my technical opinion, the problem is due to motherboard manufacturers who cut corners and don't fully implement the PCI specification. This allows for *most* setups of PCI cards to work fine, but not all.

For conflict resolution, there was a bug I discovered recently that occured if you used one of the non-ALWAYS option. Its unlikely this should cause problems, but if you feel that it is (seems like it was in your case) you can use Manual Recordings of those shows instead to override the conflict and there should be no problem. This bug is fixed for V2.0.

The diskspace issues are also being resolved for 2.0. The algorithms are correct, it just turned out there were some issues with disk latency that can affect drive space calculations. There were also some issues relating to library importing that were mentioned here that have also been addressed.

On a personal note.....I really don't appreciate the title of your post and edited it to reflect that. We gladly help all users that are having problems if they send us a support request, and we respond to all support requests. The Discussion Forums are just that....a forum for users to discuss the product and get support from other users.

Thanks to all of the rest of you who actually appreciate what I've done.

I'm also closing this thread. Feel free to start another one with a more appropriate tone if you'd like.