Is there any reason behind the madness?

[null_pointer_us]

*sigh* Where do I begin? OK, here's the original thread.

Long story short: We kept getting "No Signal" errors in SageTV, but only randomly, but installing an 8-way distribution amp fixed the problems--for a while.

A few days ago, the cable signal kept dropping off. Sometimes *some* TVs in the house would lose their signals and go black. Sometimes *all* TVs in the house would lose their signals and go black. But *constantly* the 2x PVR-500 HTPC would get the "No Signal" error on *all* channels--but *only* when trying to watch live TV or record something. Oddly, the video preview in the color calibration (under source setup) worked flawlessly during this whole time.



So we called the cable co. (Comcast), which sent out a tech rep. who fixed the problem. Specifically, he ran a new line (very *thick* cable) from the neighborhood box to our house. All was fine--except of course the HTPC, which kept the infuriating "No Signal" problem in live TV/recording in defiance of all software updates, reinstalls etc.--for about half an hour. Then the problem with the regular TVs came back and got so bad that the cable signal was virtually guaranteed to drop off during the course of any show. It was completely intolerable.

So we called the cable co. a second time, and they sent the same guy out with his buddy. They spent a long time looking at stuff outside, a long time looking at stuff inside, a long time looking at stuff outside, and then a long time fixing something inside. We tried getting some information as to what work was being done, but they just said "it will be fine." OK...problem appeared fixed. Later that night, it resurfaced. The HTPC was still FUBAR'd throughout this whole mess.

So we called the cable co. a third time, and they finally sent out a specialized HD tech. rep--whatever that is, the phone rep. sounded enthusiastic about it--who came out with his digital meter thingy, checked all the lines, and did nothing. Suddenly, the HTPC and everything else in the house began working as if there wasn't a problem. But the tech. rep. did nothing to the setup. He didn't replace any parts or change the position of any wires in the system--except to temporarily hook up his digital meter. We've got about a +5 signal coming out of the wall jacks, FWIW.

Now the "No Signal" problem is back...kinda. Specifically, *all* the TVs in the house go out for a few minutes at a time, but it's very rare (like 2-3 times a day), and the HTPC experiences a "No Signal" problem only sporatically. However, people are still *quite* upset that they are missing their recordings; yet I still have no idea *what* when wrong, *how* it came to be at least partially fixed, and *what* in blazes will fix this $#@*&$# HTPC.

Here's what I've done:

• Upgraded from SageTV from V5 to V6, and clients, too.
• Tried several Hauppauge drivers, now on current WHQL.
• Ran HCWClear.exe.
• Reinstalled SageTV.
• Restarted the computer.
• Deleted and re-added the video sources from SageTV.
• Got our family nominated for Most Annoying Customer Award (Comcast) j/k.

Between this problem and the $&#*@&$ program guide problem, this server has been failing more often than it's been working since December, 2006.

Somebody here must have a solution. If it involves nuking half of Georgia and rebuilding after the radioactivity levels have become reasonably safe, that's fine. Just so long as it gets rid of these $#&*@$ "No Signal" errors. I am so sick and tired of being called and berated and asked to fix things when I have no idea why they're failing!



Suggestions for new tuner hardware?

1. We have two PCI slots, a few USB ports, and can expand the network switch to a few more ethernet ports if needed. Please do *NOT* suggest Hauppauge products. I want to completely change tuners: drivers, hardware, design, etc. to nuke this problem.

2. I have heard good things about the HDHomeRun and was wondering if 2x HDHomeRun in QAM mode could replace my 2x PVR-500 setup--adding some HD without sacrificing ability to do analog recording via. the SageTV guide. Or will I need separate analog tuners? I am aware of the whole encrypted/clear QAM HD mess BTW--and have made my decision to go with some form of QAM for HD.

3. How much ethernet bandwidth does the HDHomeRun use? Would I need a gigabit switch and/or gigabit NIC for the HTPC server? Or would attaching the HDHomeRun to the HTPC directly via a 100Mbps ethernet NIC and crossover cable work? This HTPC is running Win2K, but it could easily be upgraded to XP or Vista if necessary.

[bcjenkins]

If you can find them, I love the NVidia DualTV. They quit making them though.

B

[Narflex]

I'd be curious to see a log file from that. The only reason you get 'No Signal' errors from an analog capture device is if the hardware itself isn't outputting any data. And if that happens; that means the capture device is basically broken or you've got some bad driver install somewhere.

But based on your data there may be a setting that could help:

seeker/fast_mux_switch=false

Try that and see if it makes a difference. This setting is meant to work around errors in capture device that don't like having the channel changed while they're running.

You can email any logs to the 'betatest' address at our sagetv.com domain.

(and I'm assuming when you say 'No signal' you're referring to the SageTV UI displaying that message)

[paulbeers]

If you are going to go with 2 HDHomeruns, then you will definately want a GB NIC in your server. If you were to record 4 HD shows, that could use as much as 80mb/s just for the HDHomeruns (that doesn't leave much bandwidth for your clients!).

As for your problem, you don't suppose you had some sort of power surge through your coax cable and that messed up your cards? Could your amp have gone bad? I would try to get ahold of another tuner card to see if it works fine.

[Apap]

The first thing I would look at is the distribution amp. From what you described , it sounds like you have something sparodicly making and breaking contact like a cold solder joint in the amp's pc board. That intermittent stuff will drive you nuts.

[null_pointer_us]

bcjenkins: Thanks, I'll keep that in mind if I run across someone selling the cards (eBay or a friend).

Narflex: I shall look into enabling logging and changing that setting you mentioned. I suppose that's in the sage properties file? And yes, I'm referring to the "no signal" message displayed by the SageTV UI.

paulbeers: I wasn't really looking to record 4 HD shows simultaneously--I just wanted to use the same hardware for all four tuners for simplicity's sake. We'd never need more than 2 shows at a time anyway. Thanks for the confirmation on gigabit ethernet!

paulbeers & Apap: Cable co. tech.'s have looked at the amp 3 different times and suggested nothing of the sort, and replacement would be rather messy, so I should look into that only as a last resort. When the "no signal" problem occurs, however, the same cable line works just fine when plugged into a regular TV--no distortion at all.

[KryptoNyte]

I'm not able to get std. cable channels with the HDhomerun, pretty sure that's by design. I still use an analog tuner for non-digital cable stations. Purchasing the HDhomerun gave me 5 additional TV channels, and about 300 encrypted channels that are of course, inaccessible - that particular aspect of digital cable was new to me, and reasonably depressing.

That said, watching those 5 channels in HD was worth every penny - and hopefully there is some future value here. What these guys really need to do is create an HDhomerun style unit that can encode analog and stream data in the same fashion. Now, if they had one HDhomerun unit that could do both analog and digital ...

[mayamaniac]

When you say "sometimes *all* TVs in the house would lose their signals and go black", are the TVs connected to the SageTV server or connected directly to the 8-way amp?

If the TVs are connected to the SageTV server, then have you tried connecting it directly to the amp?

If the TVs are connected to the Amp, then this is an amp, wire, or something else causing the loss of signals. It should'nt have anything to do with your HTPC.

[null_pointer_us]

KryptoNyte: Ah, that changes everything. Now I must get the analog tuners working or buy new analog tuners of some kind. Suddenly, the HDHomeRun looks a bit less appealing. Maybe I can give Comcast a call to see if I can get a HDTV STB with firewire. My current one lacks the firewire connection. There's a USB-UIRT lying around here someplace from waaay back when we had satellite TV.

mayamaniac: The other TV's in the house get their own feeds directly from the distribution amp, so in effect whatever's connected to the amp goes out at the same time. I tend to think this is related to our housing development (which is constantly building new houses) although at least some of it was the cable co.'s fault due to the fact that the service outages were excessive and that they occurred at odd times like 9:00 PM.

[null_pointer_us]

Does the following HDMI capture card work with SageTV:

http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity/

The product is claimed to be compatible with DirectShow, which is IIRC what SageTV and BeyondTV use, but I was wondering whether the input will automatically show up in SageTV's source setup. If this works, then for $250 w/ little or no hacking one could have a HD source in SageTV--and it'd work with any STB supporting DVI or HDMI output.

Do I understand this product correctly?

I have a USB-UIRT to do the actual channel-changing.

Although if the industry gets wind of this, we may need to have secure remotes keyed to digitally unique identifiers so that a person can only send a signal from the remote that's been licensed to sync with that particular device.

[phelme]

I don't think the problem is with getting a BackMagic product to work, it's that to record raw HD you'll need huge amounts of disk space to do it since it'll be recorded at a rate of 8 GB a minute or something.

[mattdcknsn]

I dont know anything about this capture card, but it does say you can have compressed formats,

If you need lower data rate editing, you can also select from a range of professional compressed video capture modes.

I figure this would be software encoding though. But like I said I dont know for sure.

Originally Posted by phelme

I don't think the problem is with getting a BackMagic product to work, it's that to record raw HD you'll need huge amounts of disk space to do it since it'll be recorded at a rate of 8 GB a minute or something.

Although from looking at the specs further it says:

The HDMI standard sometimes includes copy protection encryption, such as commonly found on DVD players and some brands of set top boxes. When connected to these copy protected sources, the HDMI specification defines that Intensity cards cannot capture. Always confirm copyright ownership before capture or distribution of content. Intensity media file formats are fully compatible with DeckLink and Multibridge capture cards. Compatible with Microsoft Windows™ and Apple Intel based Mac Pro systems. Apple Power PC systems are not yet supported.

I would imagine that this means it wont work with STBs.

[null_pointer_us]

I suppose that product really was too good to be true.

Anyway, the periodic cable outages are gone now. We had them throughout the week at odd times--too often for construction, methinks. It turns out the amp. hadn't been properly grounded; when we did ground the amp, the normal TVs appeared to work reliably.

We did experience some "no signal" messages on the server afterwards, but that could be a different problem.

The fast_remux switch did nothing, unfortunately.

I have a few more things to try out yet before I can say that the SageTV server is getting a 100% clean cable TV signal from the amp. Then I will focus on the server itself.

I'll get those logs in to SageTV support sometime this weekend. The logs just haven't been a high priority until the cable distribution has been working reliably (24/7).

[phelme]

According to the docs for the BlackMagic Intensity, even for compressed video, you'll need around 18GB for one hour of 1280x720P with BlackMagic's Motion JPEG compression (docs here). The more standard HD-DVCPro encoding is like 50GB per hour. In any case you're going to need a way to convert either for Sage's use.

You're totally right about HDMI and copy protection. I tossed my Comcast Motorola Firewire STB because the broadcast "copy once" flag is permanently enacted on CBS in my area and no stream gets to my PC. The Intensity will likely have the same issue.

There are HD solutions like the R5000 mod for DirecTV & DishTV receivers and a few assorted cables boxes, but it'll run you ~$500 plus the loss of warranty on your receiver.

[null_pointer_us]

Update:

Cable's still spotty. It's been going out for several minutes several times a day, all over the house. This means the trouble is either the amp. or the cable co.

We spotted a cable co. guy out at the neighborhood box. He changed something that killed the cable for about an hour, then it was fine. We still get the periodic outages now, though.

For whatever reason, the SageTV server's "mysterious" no signal problem has disappeared, so there won't be any logs to send in.



This week's PVR testing regimen will be focusing on the amp. After that, if we still have problems, we're going to bug Comcast into fixing the darn thing. Maybe the fourth service call will be the charm.

Oh, and as if that weren't enough, our SageTV client, which has been working flawlessly for months up to this point, has suddenly developed terrible stuttering and audio distortion on the playback of shows that play back just fine on the SageTV server. I've restarted both PC's and all network equipment to no avail.

BTW, the animated smilies next to the reply window cause CPU usage to spike at 100% every 2-3 seconds, making this post very hard to type and proofread.

[mayamaniac]

Originally Posted by null_pointer_us

BTW, the animated smilies next to the reply window cause CPU usage to spike at 100% every 2-3 seconds, making this post very hard to type and proofread.

You're computer has some serious issues. Those smilies are just animated GIF, which shouldn't cause any CPU spikes.

[null_pointer_us]

Yeah, turned out to my PVR-150 overreacting to a cable outage. For some reason this always causes CPU usage spikes every 2-3 seconds (under Vista 64 MCE) until I reboot. Probably a driver issue--worked fine in Vista 32. But this doesn't really have anything to do with my SageTV problems...

[mayamaniac]

I'm surprise the PVR-150 driver works in Vista 64bit, did hauppauge released 64bit drivers?

[null_pointer_us]

Yes, apparently so. At least the card "worked" OOTB after Vista 64 setup (clean install).

The driver version is listed as: 6.0.6000.16408, dated 1/8/2007

But I'm having this issue whereby the drivers *occasionally* get themselves messed up, with massive stuttering (i.e. 1 fps, if that) during recording and playback and CPU usage spikes every 2-3 seconds. Having to check the TV card (and possibly reboot) before each recording is really annoying, but I can't report the problem to Microsoft until the cable problems here are fixed.

[null_pointer_us]

Cable co. to the rescue! 1.5 months late...

When I replaced the amp with some splitters, the cable signal quality went way down, and the "no signal" problem came back on all TV's digital, PC, and analog alike. So that was the very last thing I had to check to verify that nothing in my setup was causing the problem.

Yesterday, I called Comcast to schedule the fourth service call, explaining our extensive service interruption problems. I think I was on the phone for 15-20 minutes total. Anyway, neither the rep. nor I had any idea how to go about fixing this problem since none of the earlier service calls actually fixed the problem. What does one tell a cable tech. when he shows up and the cable appears to be working fine, with no sign of trouble?

This morning I get a phone call from a service tech. explaining that the power company did something about 1.5 months ago that accidentally tripped a power surge, killing the power supply and some other components in the neighborhood-wide cable distribution amps. At the time, the tech. had replaced the PSU with another used PSU, and then sometime later with a new PSU when more complaints surfaced. He also replaced a bunch of other components (something called harnesses, etc.) in the box at this time.

But apparently, none of these things fixed the problem permanently, so we--and the rest of the neighborhood--kept experiencing service interruptions at random times throughout the day. Anyway, the tech. said he will be doing a systematic check of cable equipment in the whole area until they track down the source of the problems.



But how did it take a month and a half to isolate the problem?