Moved server to new system, can't capture video!

[src666]

I could really use some help here. I've moved my SageTV server to a new system, and for some reason it's not able to capture from ANY of my video sources.

The new system is an MSI K9AG Neo-2 Digital motherboard, AMD 64 X2 5200 CPU, 2 GB of RAM, on board video (not used as a client except during setup/testing) - AMD 690G/SB600 chipset. It's running a fully patched Windows XP Pro install.

I moved all of the recordings to new drives, set up all my shares so that both systems saw them as video paths, then moved the drives and my WIZ.BIN and SAGE.Properties files to the new system. Also set it up with all the correct paths, so that on startup it had all the same UNC shares.

The video drives are local to the system, but accessed via UNC paths. There is a dedicated Sage user, and it has full rights to the shares. Sage plays the existing videos fine, both locally and on the clients.

I then installed my capture cards - 1 each Hauppauge 500 and 250, and an NVidia DualTV. Installed the latest drivers for all of them, no complaints from windows.

When I run sage, it tries to set up the video sources. As soon as I specify the tuner input, it tries to show the preview. At that point I get a black box where the preview should be, and Sage locks up totally, sometimes with the "waiting" circle, sometimes not. It never comes back from that state.

I've tried each of the cards alone in the system, with the same results. I've tried setting them up in service mode and in stand-alone mode. Hauppage's WinTV program also fails to work with the cards.

I've got until mid-day Sunday to get it all working before I have to revert to the old system - no recordings are scheduled until Sunday night. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance!

edit: I've added a debug log from an attempt to set up the DualTV. This was done with Sage in service mode.

[GKusnick]

Video source config and other hardware-specific stuff is stored in Sage.properties, so if you copied that over from your old system, you may have entries in there that don't make sense on your new machine. Best practice on a hardware move is to start over with a fresh .properties file and reconfigure everything through the Config Wizard.

If you have a lot of third-party stuff with property settings you don't want to have to redo, you could try copying over just those specific entries from your old Sage.properties -- but not until after you've run through the wizard and got all the basic stuff working.

[src666]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

Video source config and other hardware-specific stuff is stored in Sage.properties, so if you copied that over from your old system, you may have entries in there that don't make sense on your new machine. Best practice on a hardware move is to start over with a fresh .properties file and reconfigure everything through the Config Wizard.

If you have a lot of third-party stuff with property settings you don't want to have to redo, you could try copying over just those specific entries from your old Sage.properties -- but not until after you've run through the wizard and got all the basic stuff working.

Tried that. Last night I saved my original SAGE.Properties, renamed the Sage.Properties.Default, and ran with that setup. This morning I just moved all of the Sage.Properties.* files into another directory and started absolutely clean. Yes, I had shut down Sage and ensured (Task Manager) that nothing was running.

Same result. Once I try to choose a video input (Tuner, SVideo, etc.), I get the black box in preview and then sage locks hard.

[davephan]

Did you do install the Windows XP Pro operating system from scratch? Or, did you use an image of the old system? You should start with a scratch Windows XP Pro install without the Hauppauge cards, then update all the OS patches. If you have disk imaging software, take a checkpoint image at that point, so you never have to repeat that work again.

Next, install the Hauppauge cards and install the Hauppauge software. If you cannot get the basic Hauppauge software to function, I think you will have trouble later when trying to install SageTV.

When I built an older SageTV system, it took me a couple of attempts to get the Hauuppage software to work successfully. At that time, I took an image of the base Windows operating system, and recovered to the base image a couple of times to get the Hauppauge software to install and function correctly. I then took another disk image after that point, so I would not have to repeat that work again.

After the Hauppauge is successfully installed, install the SageTV prequesites are installed, then install SageTV.


Dave

[src666]

Yes, it was a bare-metal build using a new XP SP2 disk, not a port of the old system. The only things that came from the old system were the recordings, WIZ.BIN and Sage.Properties.

I'm going to keep working on it, but right now things don't look good.

[CollinR]

Does the Hauppauge software work? If that won't don't even bother tring to get Sage going.

Why did you choose that motherboard? That threw up red flags for me right off. I don't have any problems with any CPU or chipset provider but with digital video coming from the PCI bus I always use Intel. In the past 15 years of building these things it has proven time and time again that the capure manufactures build ant test with Intel northbridge controllers. Granted it is obvious that smaller systems with just a few encoders usually Via/SiS/XXX chipsets seem to get by okay.

[src666]

OK, I finally got it worked out. It seems that something went wrong with the base SageTV install. After getting a single video card working with Hauppauge's WinTV, Sage still locked up when it tried to preview the source.

I cleared out Sage, did a new install, and it stopped locking up. I was able to get all the cards working, and everything seems to be back to (almost) normal.

The only remaining issue is that there is a discrepancy between the recording library (all 700GB of prior recordings are available) and Sage's disk space accounting. According to the System info screen, there are only 25GB of recordings in the library. Hopefully this won't cause any trouble down the road, but I'm happy to have the system running for now.

Thanks for all the suggestions!