Newer Avermedia M780 drivers

[heffe2001]

Originally Posted by BFisher

I use them for OTA and the cards work great - I've had no issues.

I'm just not sure with the distance I am from the sources, if I'll pick up anything, that and the huge hill I'm on the OTHER side of :P.

[frankinla]

Originally Posted by kricker

I am having pretty good success with the m780 and QAM with the latest beta of Sage and Avermedia beta drivers .26. There are still a few things to iron out, but at least I can now tune and record HD channels.

The biggest quirk at the moment is Sage causes some sort of error when tuning an HD channel after resuming from standby. The PC simply reboots. The weird thing is it doesn't always happen. The other issue is some of my channels are skipped during a scan, but I was able to add them manually.

That's all for now. I just wanted to let other m780 owners know in case they wanted to try.

Hi... question: If using M780's for QAM in Sage, you need to use the Beta drivers? Not the WHQL drivers?

[kricker]

For XP correct. For Vista I believe they released WHQL drivers very recently that do work. There is a bug in the XP drivers though. After resuming from standby, if you try to tune a HD channel the system will crash. I came up with a work around using devcon. After resuming from standby devcon runs and re-initalizes the drivers. This prevents the crashing.

EDIT:
You should get either the 2.5.0.26 or 2.5.0.29 drivers for XP.

[Graygeek]

Kricker ...

Have you had any issue with occasional crashes under XP when tuning an analog channel on M780 after powerup, resume from S3 sleep? Been working with SAGE support, they offered a test DLL to try but still bad. Wonder if your devcon work around might help. Care to share any details on that?

Thanks

[BFisher]

geek - I have that issue as well. I just don't reboot it anymore (about once a month whether it needs it or not! LOL).

I am running .19 drivers though. After seeing Krickers post, I checked and see they are up to .26 on the website... are you having the same problems with these drivers?

[Graygeek]

I running the .19 drivers as well. .26 must be a beta driver? I'll have to give it a shot. In another thread I mentioned that this card runs flawless with BeyondTV and the .19 drivers, but SAGE has so many many other advantages i'd never go back. I'll try the beta drivers and post results!

[kricker]

I am using .29 drivers. Special beta drivers I acquired from support. They don't seem to do anything more than the .26 drivers did. The .26 drivers also crashed after resuming from standby. Anything under .25 didn't do QAM very well in any application. I'm not sure how BeyondTV is doing it with the .19 drivers.

@Graygeek
I'm sure it would crash if tuning anything after resume, I just never had it tune analog, I already have 2 tuners for that. So far devcon is working well for me.

[Graygeek]

Just to clarify, in my case I'm using XP Pro 32bit and not doing QAM. Using the M780 for over-the-air HD and analog Cable. Over-the-air works 100% with both Beyond and SAGE. Analog cable is 100% with Beyond, but tends to crash Sage on occasion, mostly after powerup of wake from S3. I wonder Vista users have this issue or if it specific to XP?

[kricker]

Okay, interesting you had troubles with Sage crashing after resume and not BeyondTV, did you test that extensively? I tested with GBPVR (which has some great QAM support) and Sage. Tuning HD with either after S3 resulted in the system crashing (I never tried to tune analog). Avermedia is aware, but I do not know where they are in addressing it. I haven't had a chance to talk to support there in a couple weeks.

[Graygeek]

Yes, I had run the M780 under Beyond nearly a year before converting to Sage. Never, ever, ever did it crash in Beyond while tuning either ATSC or Analog Cable. It was so stable with Beyond I purchased a second with the plan to use both to build a Sage server. Now I'm regretting that. FWIW I ran both .16 & .19 drivers with Beyond. I'll ping Qain at Sage in the next day or so and if it looks hopeless I'll have to look at other options for capping analog cable .... at least until the day the local cable goes all digital, not holding breath.

[kricker]

I'll tell you that I informed Qian of the crashing and it pointed toward driver issues. If it wasn't for Qian, I never would've got Sage to tune the QAM from that card. He did a lot of work with me getting it working as well as it does.

[Graygeek]

Followup: Tried the .26 beta drivers from Avermedia .... analog still crashes SAGE at times. No more word from Qain in last two weeks. Looks like SAGE and the M780 are not really a good match so I have ordered two HVR-2250's and hope my experience goes better. Guess the M780's are heading to EBAY. Geat card but not when used with SAGE.

[Graygeek]

Qian came thru! see my other thread with fix attached.

[sundansx]

Avermedia m780 analog volume problem:

I have an avermedia m780 and I just installed the new 2.5.0.29 drivers from Avermedia's site. I was previously running 2.5.0.14 for quite some time.
I shutdown sage completely so I did not have to re-add the tuner.
Now my analog recordings are at quite a bit lower volume than they used to be.
Note: I have a pvr250 as my secondary SD recorder and it's record volume is as high as the m780 used to be.
I have both of these connected to STBs and I checked the volume on both and they are the same. I suspect the driver because it started happening on my testing minutes after I finished the driver install. I have removed and reinstalled the driver already.

Anyone else experience this with the driver? Is there a fix?

EDIT: Since several here are using the .19 drivers successfully I decided to give those a swing and they seem to be working pretty good. no more volume problem. Wonder what is up with those .29 drivers. Maybe they should have tried them on an m780 before they posted them, eh?

[Graygeek]

Originally Posted by kricker

For XP correct. For Vista I believe they released WHQL drivers very recently that do work. There is a bug in the XP drivers though. After resuming from standby, if you try to tune a HD channel the system will crash. I came up with a work around using devcon. After resuming from standby devcon runs and re-initalizes the drivers. This prevents the crashing.

EDIT:
You should get either the 2.5.0.26 or 2.5.0.29 drivers for XP.

Kricker,
Just currious on your HD crash. I'm now running two M780's generally doing good. Analog is now flawless after Qian's fix. I do on ocassion see a Java crash at the start of an ATSC HD recording after waking from s3 sleep. Sage service restarts a minute later and all is fine. I noticed a hs_err_pid*.log is generated by Java when this happens. Is this anything like you are seeing? For now I'm padding HD recordings by 1 minute at start. Any advantage to your devcon solution vs. padding?

[kricker]

Well, I wasn't just getting a Java crash. I was getting a system crash. A full on bluescreen with memory dump. Since using my little devcon workaround that has not happened. Maybe I'll try Qian's fix and turn off my devcon hack to see what happens.

[kricker]

No luck. I still get a crash after resuming from standby without using devcon.

[Graygeek]

Kricker, I'm having an occasional issue with turning HD after sleep causing a JAVA crash. I'd like to try the driver restart via DEVCON. Any chance you'd be willing to share your DEVCON commands for the M780. I hate reinventing the wheel! Thanks! Once I cure this I'll be 100%

[kricker]

Originally Posted by Graygeek

Kricker, I'm having an occasional issue with turning HD after sleep causing a JAVA crash. I'd like to try the driver restart via DEVCON. Any chance you'd be willing to share your DEVCON commands for the M780. I hate reinventing the wheel! Thanks! Once I cure this I'll be 100%

I may have a new fix for it. Care to be a guinea pig and try it out?
ftp://ftp.aver.com/../../../M780/BSOD_Fix/
user:beta
pass:betatest

Download those new drivers, but do NOT install them. Just unzip the package. Then go to device manager and under "sound, video game controlers" choose the "Avermedia m780 PCIe NTSC/ATSC Combo Tv Tuner (TUNER)". Make sure you are choosing the (Tuner). Right click on it and choose properties go to driver/update driver. In pop-up click No, not at this time/ Install from a list .../Don't search I will choose../Have Disk/ Then broswe to where you unzipped the above package and choose the "AVerM780.inf" file, then click next to install it.

Now you should have only the tuner upgraded to the newest drive. Reboot and try a standby test.

Sine I have done this, I have disabled my devcon script and so far it seems to resume from standby and record without issues. I did one other system tweak around the same time, so I am not sure which one fixed it. So if you could try this one and let me know, that would be great.

[Graygeek]

Thanks! I'll give it a try!